Where to look for an example of an excellenly made search functionality in an open source project

Question

I am working on a search functionality for an encyclopedia-like application about species with millions of topics. Search of the information is organized mostly by looking up either common name or scientific name of the species. Currently we are using Solr as a backend search engine.

I am looking for code examples to learn about algorithms (not necessarily using Solr) used in searching of similar organized information.

Do you know open source projects to learn about such algorithms and approaches to searching?

Answer 1

OK, I only have a half-answer for you... a good place to start might be to go look through the source of an open-source project like Nutch or Solr or Apache Lucene.

If you're interested in options aside from open-source, a really, really good textbook on this very topic is "Managing Gigabytes". The book goes through many different search, IR, and storage algorithms for developing search engines:

• Managing Gigabytes