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72

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I'm looking for a search solution and i can't seem to find it. It's meant for a website that offers over a million products of different types that should be searchable. Products are stored in a database with a complex structure (a product property is not mapped directly to a table column) so i think it's easier to use a crawler than a database searcher. Because when i generate HTML for the product i have to retrieve the properties anyway so i can add them to the meta data.

What i'm looking for is a search module that i can integrate in my .NET web application and provide me with the following features:

  • Crawler or database search solution (cause i can imagine that crawling might not be the way to go, feel free to advice me on that)
  • Advanced search form that i can customize with my own properties
  • Facetted search possiblities (after a user has searched, he should be able to narrow it)
  • Obviously every part of the result page should be customizable

I found that alot of people are enthousiastic about Lucene.NET. Can that solution provide me with the features i have listed above? Do you guys have any other products that you can advice me?

+1  A: 

We use SOLR (Lucene based) along with the SolrNet library.

It's not .Net, it's a java app, but it's given us (an otherwise entirely MSFT shop) no troubles at all.

It has a number of built in ways to get your data into it:

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/DataImportHandler

It integrates nicely and is easy to scale, just stick a few instances behind a load balancer that your webheads call.

Chris