When a web site grows, at some point there is a need to have good search capabilities because a menu or simple sitemap will not help your visitors find the information they are searching for.
A CMS like TYPO3 has a build-in search engine called 'Indexed Search' but since indexed search uses general SQL queries to find the page or records a user is interested in, this is going to be incresingly slow because to find the right records the SQL's are buikld around un-anchored SQL queries (they look like WHERE .... LIKE '%words%). These style of SQL queries they are un-anchored, the RDBM cannot use a index and thus needs to do a expensive table scan.
The same is for other CMS system's that use there own Search engine, often based on un-anchored SQL queries that find there information.
Solr Search
According the Solr's website: "Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites."
Searching is done using keywords, just like what you are used to, plural words and singular words are found easely, Take for example searching for the word 'wheel' on this site. This will find all documents (in this case pages) with the word wheel or wheels seemlesly!
Other nice features of Solr are beable to use facetted searches, these are the type of searches that allows you to search in a dataset from different angles. You can ask Solr what manufacturers make Radio's, or what products does some manufacturer have between 1-100usd, and shows the number of products within each category. This type of searches are often found on the left hand side of a website where you can refine your searches.
I can help you implementing Solr within TYPO3, or as a stand alone srarch engine in your custom application written in Java or PHP.
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