Solr Round 2

In between watching the “balloon boy” news today, we managed to get launched an upgrade to our search infrastructure. For quite some time we’ve been running Sphinx for search, and a small Solr implementation just to return videos related to another video.

Today we’ve upgraded to running all of our search functions on Solr. Although we’re big fans of sphinx, we decided it was more work to support two separate systems, and Solr just proved more flexible overall.

That said, getting converted over to Solr took about 5 times as long as our original sphinx implementation. That was both a function of Solr’s complexity, and the complexity of adapting our existing code. Solr really is a more powerful search solution, but requires significantly more investment at the beginning to get running.