Faceted Search (2009) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Faceted Search (2009) [pdf]

disi.unitn.it

27 pointspmoriarty12 comments

Can anyone recommend any open-source faceted search tools?

Bonus for:

  - being:
    - easy to install (via yum, apt-get, brew, etc)
    - accessible from the command line / shell
    - accessible as a library
    - actively developed
  - not requiring (though allowing) an external database
  - allowing search through regular expressions
  - emacs integration

elasticsearch has great options for facet search, which can be combined with their text search for some pretty great relevance.

Apache Solr is also extremely good. I use it at work for enterprise search and know it meets all but your last requirement (emacs integration) but a search for "solr emacs integration" suggests even that is possible.

Both ElasticSearch and Solr are services, and both are built from Apache Lucene, a set of Java libraries providing indexed search, with facets and many other features. Xapian is a C++ library with similar functionality, although it doesn't seem to have the same level of popularity as Lucene.

Solr is something you can implement faceted search with, but I'm not sure what you'd want from emacs integration...

Faceted search typically helps you drill down to find a set of objects or other discrete entities; not really for searching within such an entity.

In other words you need to have a set of objects/entities that are already fairly well-structured or have reasonably coherent attributes on them from which to build the facets.

In the worst-case, a faceted search view of your computer's filesystem might only be able to show you facets based on datetimes (created/modified), filesize, filename extension, permissions etc. but nothing about the content of the files.

If you've drilled down to a collection of .mp3 files, your faceted search engine might then be able to offer facets based on MP3 tag data.

A good example is RS Components and Digi-Key. I can't pull one up now, but sometimes I find that these suppliers won't show you many facets until you've drilled down into a subset of their product range that has a common set of attributes - at which point you can suddenly filter by current rating, voltage, MTBF, etc. whereas at some broader category view you might only have brand-name, stock status and lead-time facets.

See down the left bar here: http://au.rs-online.com/web/c/semiconductors/processors-micr...

Right, as can see by page 9 of the book, traditional library cataloging techniques, e.g., the Dewey Decimal System, has a tough time knowing just where to catalog a book, say, History of Nineteenth Century European Military Technology, that is, in history, Europe, European history, military history, history of technology, military technology, European technology, etc.?

So, facets are a generalization of the Dewey system that is supposed to provide better options for such cataloging challenges. Okay.

In a sense Google's YouTube has a similar problem: Often, maybe usually, at the end of playing a video clip, there is a display of related video clips. So, if play a video of Heifetz playing the Beethoven violin concerto with von Karajan (assuming there is such), then what to recommend next, anything by Heifetz, Beethoven, violin, von Karajan, or any concerto, any violin concerto, any violin music, or just something related artistically, determined however, any music from near year 1800, etc.?

Right, there needs to be a better way.

Okay, been working on that. Got some ideas and the code written. Loading some initial data now, and intend to go live ASAP.

A current example of faceted search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834611

I was disappointed by the content... Most of it is somewhat obvious and something I just skipped. I expected to find something valuable at least at the end, some insights for example in the front end concerns section (e.g. ideas for dynamic ranking, something I am currently working on). But again, nothing really valuable.

So to put it briefly, Faceted Search for Dummies in 100 pages (which probably could be halved without losing anything).

I found it a bit weird that the "What Are Facets?" section does not actually give a formal definition of what a facet is.

but thanks for sharing :)

This is good stuff -- the author was in charge of faceted search at LinkedIn.

That's not where he learned about faceted search, but rather Endeca where he was a developer.

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