Apache Solr is an open-source enterprise search server.
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Searchspring
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Searchspring headquartered in Denver offers intelligent site search for customer facing web pages and ecommerce, providing product discvoery tools, navigation viacategory page, and other features to improve site navigation.
In February 2020, Searchspring merged with Nextopia to expand its product capabilities, and customer base. Nextopia customers will continue to receive the same services, under the SearchSpring brand.
Very effective for end-user searching applications and for generating search results. Also very well suited to those looking for high reliability and performance. If [you're doing] fuzzy searching or if you are working on a smaller end-user application or an internal application that does not require high performance and flexible/adapting searching then it may not be necessary to use Solr.
SearchSpring has improved our conversion rate on our website in just the few weeks we've had them on the site. It is obvious that the improvements will continue over time with the incremental increases in traffic every week.
Faceted navigation and field collapsing/grouping : filtering and quick results were what we needed for our websites. Our customers needed to have this functionalities for good and efficient results.
We tested them with our customers' registered searches (they received all new goods matching with their registered searches by emails and/or mobile push). Results were incredible by comparison with our old system (old MySQL requests).
Note : we didn't put all our data in Solr. Just what we need for searching uses. Other data stayed in our MySQL database.
Auto-suggest : our old auto-suggest wasn't performing well. With Apache Solr, our new one was worked really well ! The suggestions came quickly and suggestions were good.
We also extended auto-suggestion with geo-spatial data and it worked well.
Hit highlighting : we used this functionality and we didn't have problem and nasty surprise.
Keep all data status during data upgrading (see next details for improvements)
Customize search results pages - ability to add banners or other visual creative for search results pages based on specific queries.
Easily badge products - set thumbnail badges to show specific messages on search results pages; allows for easy identification of items on sale, featured items, or items that may be eligible for free shipping.
Easily merchandise search results pages - can be done on a per-query basis.
Would like to see 4-Tell and Search Spring in one dashboard.
Dream: Using customer demographic data plus past purchases plus browsing history to recommend products (machine learning), ability to easily manually connect specific products that the algorithm may not catch, for example, earrings and necklaces in the same style, accessory type products, etc. We would want this to work so that relating a product to another automatically works in reverse (currently it has to be done for both items).
Ability to create custom landing page results that do not show "search results for ____" at the top
It takes some time to deploy and currectly maintein it. And also, to learn how to use and integrate in the enviroment as well. Once you get theses steps done, it usability is very simple, and almost of the time it don't require no further attention on it. Even for maintence, if you deploy it on a cluster mode, it is very reliable and easy to take one host down.
We have a monthly phone call with our account manager, and she is available for calls in between as well. She has always been accessible. Working with her has been easy and she has provided training where needed. She is proactive in making sure we have everything we need and feel comfortable with the platform.
We switched from search indexes stored in MySQL to soar and it's made a world of difference for our growing businesses. The relational databases are very poor for handling the complex data searches require and Solr delivered all the tools we need to get the performance our end users are demanding.
We reviewed multiple providers 5 years ago before making the switch to Search Spring. While I can't recall the providers we reviewed we have been very happy with Search Spring. We appreciate the transparency to their product roadmap and their acquisition of 4-Tell to improve their product recommendations engine.
It's enabled us to deliver fast, relevant search results on our new website. The site is still in beta and being actively developed so our complete ROI is still unknown.
It integrates very well with Drupal so it has saved us from having to develop a custom solution.
