Community Search Restored!
It's not a secret that search is a major performance hit to Elgg when you reach a certain size of database and user activity. Some time ago we made the temporary decision to disable native elgg search on the community and rely on google. This didn't feel right and we really wanted to get back to having our own internal search.
It just so happened that around this time one of my clients at Arck Interactive had commissioned a custom SOLR integration for search. The original plugin was developed by Billy Gunn, refined by me, then completely rewritten for general use and released to the community.
With testing help from a number of community members (Gerard, Ura Soul) the plugin has matured to a very stable and production-ready state. I rolled it out on the community here a few weeks ago and have been testing/watching it and the performance has been stellar.
For global site searches we're seeing a wait reduction in the 90-95% range, usually having results in a fraction of a second. Additionally the relevance of the results is significantly better than the bundled Elgg search plugin.
So check it out, enjoy the responsiveness and the ability to stay on the site when searching.
Thanks again to Arck Interactive for the initial development work and allowing me to build off it for the community version.
The solr search plugin can be found here: http://community.elgg.org/plugins/1635100/1.5.1/solr-search
Matt Beckett
Latest comments
gushbellino on Elgg Blog: Elgg Blog is moving to the community ():
Thank you for the announcement Matt.
Fantastic work, Matt. Thanks! Maybe it would be good to include a link to the publicly-available version of this plugin so others can use it on their own sites as well?
I would love to see us harness the power of this faster search engine for better UX all around. For example, could we use it to turn on advanced search features for plugins where you can filter by category, compatible elgg version, and text search all at the same time. Feasible?
Excellent news!!!
Great work!!
Thanks Evan, I've added in the link to the plugin (not sure why that didn't occur to me when I wrote it).
And yes, there's definitely potential to extend the plugin search with those features. One of the projects I have this on already has 1.7 million entities and a custom search that filters on numerous metadata points with weighted results and it's performing just as well. Solr seems to be a one-trick pony, but it's really good at its trick :)
sounds good :)
(using smartphone)
I'm getting a search error here in the elgg community if I search for: 'classified'
Fatal error: Call to a member function getType() on a non-object in /var/www/community.elgg.org/mod/search/views/default/search/object/comment/entity.php on line 15
Hey, RJ, thanks for reporting the issue.
Can you add this as a ticket to http://github.com/elgg/community_solr? It's a known issue that we're working on but I don't know of a tracking bug just yet.
Hi evan!
Yes I will! I was looking for a classifieds plugin, but forgot the 's' hehe