Drupal, 80.000 nodes View: what search engine to enable ?

Question

hi,

I've a view with 80.000 nodes. I need to add a search field and

1) I was wondering if I can enable the "Search filter" directly inside the view. Is it going to an endless search ?

2) Should I enable the main drupal search. Is it going to be an endless indexing ?

thanks

Answer 1

If you have 80k nodes you should think about setting up some proper search. The search in core isn't great for full text search. I don't think views will perform well with that many nodes, unless you are searching simple stuff like ints with exposed filters.

You could considder apache solr. It's not easy to setup but it has a good module and will give you a lot of search possibilities. You can

• Host it yourself, which is difficult, and require more or less full control over the server
• Let acquia host the apache solr for you. They are experts at hosting apache solr for drupal sites. It's a paid service but it might very well be your cheapest if you don't have your own server. It's them that's made the module for it, and they have good support staff.

Answer 2

As googletorp mentions, you probably need to set up something different for search. Here is a good article on the state of search in Drupal: http://www.poplarware.com/articles/drupal_search. I'm wondering if perhaps faceted search (http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search) would achieve what you are looking for.

Answer 3

If you don't want to set up Solr, or use Acquia's hosted Solr, check out this module which incorporates Zend's Lucene clone (Solr is built on Lucene): http://drupal.org/project/luceneapi

It won't offer all the features of Solr, but it will be a lot better than Drupal's core search, and will be a lot easier / cheaper to integrate than Solr or Sphinx.

UPDATE: Actually, I just noticed this in the module description, so probably it won't work for you, at least in its current form:

Search Lucene API targets small to medium sized web sites, usually with less than 5,000 nodes. Because this module is a fully integrated solution, all search processing is handled inside of Drupal and simply cannot scale to large volumes of data. Going forward, Search Lucene API will have the option to integrate with distributed search services such as Elastic Search, which have the potential of scaling up to millions of documents.

I'm leaving the answer in place in case it helps someone else with a smaller site.