At DrupalCamp Stockholm 2009 Robert Douglass from Acquia talked about Drupal with Apache Solr search. Solr takes searching in Drupal a huge step forward. Speed and faceted search on author/type/term/language/date/CCK fields are the main features. A “Did you mean …” function is there also and it works surprisingly well.
There are also some really interesting things coming like multi site searching, dokument searching and searching of external non Drupal sites.
Drupal.org is already using Apache Solr search. Search for Sweden there and I’m the top result! http://drupal.org/search/apachesolr_search/sweden
When you search on Drupal.org or here on xdeb.org check out the blocks at the side of the search result page. They let you sort the result and filter it by author, node type and taxonomy terms. This is faceted search.
For people who don’t want to set up and maintain there own Apache Solr search Acquia has the service Acquia Search with a 30 day trial.
If you still here and want to know how to set up Apache Solr for Drupal 6 on a Debian GNU/Linux server here follows how I did it.
