In this chapter, we explored the idea of how it could be possible to improve the search experience in a wider perspective, from searching for some specific terms to finding relevant documents.

We started by introducing the Solr faceting capabilities to create a dynamic search experience for the user. By mixing the common usage of advanced parameters, operators, and function combinations with facets, we started to consider ways for moving into the data collection. This changes how we understand searches; every query could be seen as a pseudo-document, and we used Solr as a match engine rather than a search engine.

Filter queries have a crucial behavior, improving performance on the technical side and restricting the domain in which we execute our searches on the more abstract side. They have also led us to introduce the concept of similarity. We saw similarity in action by using the built-in MoreLikeThis component to obtain recommendations, adding value to common search results.