Rob's Blog

The Carrot2 clustering engine has been on my radar for a couple of months now. It calls itself a 'search results clustering engine' which means that provided with a set of search results (titles and snippets) it will give back that same set grouped into clusters. In this post I'm going to show you how you can use Carrot2 and PHP to cluster your search results.

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Today the first release of Forage is out. It comes with core support for Solr, Xapian and ZSL and faceting support for Solr. Faceting support for Xapian will hopefully be arriving with the release of Xapian 1.1 in the near future. You can download Forage here. In this post I'm going to walk through the main example found in the Forage source code, offline Wikipedia.

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Today I added support for faceted search to Forage. Faceted search is a way of drilling down into search results by filtering on particular fields or categories. The example below is relatively simple in that it only has one facet, category, but there is no reason why you can't have multiple different 'facets'. This is, in fact, done quite often and very successfully in product searches.

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Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction. On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.

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Peter Morville (author of Ambient Findability, a really good read) has started a series of collections relating to search interface design patterns on Flickr. It is brilliant, check it out.

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