Solr searching engine is bad
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I have been using Solr for 6 years. I have to say the results it provides are terrible. Of course this is not a problem of nodebb. I would say its a problem of Solr. Our website uses Chinese, so right now Solr is our only solution. However, it is terrible.
Some users just dont use it at all, they search something by Google like:
keyword site:mywebsite.comThe results are very good. Much better than Solr.
I am wondering if there is a change to have a better solution...
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@sharonyue said in Solr searching engine is bad:
I have been using Solr for 6 years. I have to say the results it provides are terrible. Of course this is not a problem of nodebb. I would say its a problem of Solr. Our website uses Chinese, so right now Solr is our only solution. However, it is terrible.
Some users just dont use it at all, they search something by Google like:
keyword site:mywebsite.comThe results are very good. Much better than Solr.
I am wondering if there is a change to have a better solution...
unfortunately, it is the same for us... since there are unconventional characters in Turkish, we are also having problems with the search function.
I wrote it before, you can read it here:
https://community.nodebb.org/post/75862well, the search function does its job, but if you do not remember the exact word and how it was written, usually you cannot get the results you want. I also get more relevant results through google search most of the time
we are trying to solve this problem with keywords, hashtags, and tags... I usually write several related keywords at the end of a long, informative post like this:
so, people can still find these posts. We are also re-structuring our tags/hashtags system to help people find what there are looking for, but it is a work in progress... however, I have to admit it is getting harder since the content is growing...
by the way, this is the hashtag plugin we use :
https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-hashtags
(but I believe it is not perfect yet)I am also interested in hearing how others solve these search function problems...
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@crazycells I do agree with you. Searching engine is a pain for us who dont use English
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I agree, Solr is pretty bad. I made the plugin and it functioned well enough at first, but it is still pretty bad.
Have you tried the dbsearch plugin? I am not sure if support is better on Mongo+dbsearch.
I am open to different search products, happy to consider making a plugin for something like Algolia (although that is a paid service)... maybe Typesense?
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Meilisearch is the best. Requires little memory and is very very fast
https://www.meilisearch.com/
https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-js -
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@sharonyue said in Solr searching engine is bad:
@volanar How about this meilisearch compared with Solr, have u ever used it before.
I have been using elasticsearch for many years. And it's terrible. It works great but requires a lot of RAM. More than the platform itself. And I've never heard of using solr. I believe meilisearch is the future. Due to the fact that it is written in rust, it is more stable, consumes very few server resources and is easier to develop. It is currently used by default in medusa.js and in laravel projects. This technology for years to come
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@gotwf said in Solr searching engine is bad:
@volanar This looks promising. At least upon cursory examination. Have you used this with NodeBB?
+1 re; the ElasticSearch comments.
I have used this on my magento platform projects. This is very cool, search on the platform is no different than search on amazon. What is good about such a search is that there are a lot of analytics, it is ideal there. But meilisearch can do the same. And many users want to move from elasticsearch to meilisearch. For small online stores, this is critical when the database and the platform itself consume 2 gigabytes of RAM, and elastic consumes 1 gigabyte of RAM by default, for its normal operation. And how often is search used compared to other platform features?
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@julian said in Solr searching engine is bad:
@sharonyue A plugin will have to be made to connect to Meilisearch. At this time we have other priorities, but anyone with the necessary technical skills can make the plugin.
I do not have the code slinger chops for this but have meilisearch looks worthy of the effort and may well be the next Solr, errmmm... ElasiticSearch... errmmm... Yahoo!!???
In any case, it would be cool to see this happen.
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@sharonyue I quickly made a plugin for Meilisearch:
https://github.com/oplik0/nodebb-plugin-meilisearchNote that it's a very early version and largely untested - it worked for me for trivial test cases (literally a few posts :V), but there aren't many knobs to adjust the settings with and it might very well be quite fragile at the moment. So I don't recommend running it in production just yet - I'll work a bit more on it probably some time next week.
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It's still not well tested, but v0.3.0 is the first version that I'd consider actually running
Seems to work fine and now ACP has actually useful settings (almost everything that Meilisearch allows you to change actually). Here it is with default settings:
I still want to add some progress bar for indexing (and actually make it work in the background, currently it might freeze the forum) and perhaps look into a front-end integration that Meilisearch offers.
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