Last year Telenet successfully migrated its knowledge base and business site to Drupal. As a member of the Ausy/DataFlow group I'm proud to announce that Telenet today launched its multisite search using Drupal.

We continued on the Apache Solr based solution we had already created for the knowledge base while Robert Douglass was hired to work on a Nutch/Solr implementation to crawl the (for now) non-Drupal based sites in the company's portfolio. This powerful combination results in a multilingual multisite search that features autocompletion, spell checking and file indexing.

Contributions were made to the following projects:

• Apache Solr Search Integration
• Apache Solr Attachments
• Apache Solr Autocomplete
• Apache Solr Multilingual
• Apache Solr Multisite Search
• Apache Solr Nodereference Extras

I posted an article on the CivicActions blog about faceted search. Follow the "Continue reading" link to see the complete post.

The ApacheSolr module allows the integration of the core search module with the power of the Apache Solr search platform. Aside from better performance the most prominent feature is the addition of faceted search. In essence it's a user-friendly manner to search for content by filtering on author, content type, taxonomy,... You can try a demonstration on the search pages of Robert Douglass, author of the ApacheSolr module.

Now, not everyone has the resources to set up a server with Apache Solr, be it an actual dedicated server to run the software on or the funds to rent one. Luckily, there's also the Faceted Search module that provides similar functionality without this extra requirement. You can check out the demonstration by David Lesieur and see how it compares to Robert's. Faceted Search also has a couple of extra features that make it a worthy competitor.

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