Drupal Next Generation Search

Experience level: 
Intermediate
Session Track: 

Code and DevOps

This track is focused on developers and the back-end technologies to deal with today’s and future challenges. With the coming release of Drupal 8, as well as emerging Web technologies, preparation is essential. These sessions will help you learn how to deliver effective solutions to meet these needs.

Speaker(s): 
mnescot
rmachado

Historically, having a free and open source local search engine on your site has generally meant limiting your search capabilities to rigid UI, simple key word indexes, and muddled results, leaving you to yearn for the sophistication and polish of the commercial and proprietary search solutions.

Now, however. the power of the cutting-edge Lucene search and indexing library, the Solr and ElasticSearch platforms, and a wide range of related Drupal modules and extensions, provides the opportunity not only to upgrade your site’s core search features, but also to transform your content and add new dimensions to your users’ experience.

This session will look at how Drupal developers and site administrators can realize this opportunity by integrating powerful and diverse tools such as natural language processing, semantic search, clustering, recommendation engines, social graphs, and geospatial analysis with their CMS. We will also consider how we can use multiple cores in Apache Solr to precisely tailor search indexing and UI for different content types, and briefly compare the advantages of Solr and ElasticSearch.