What do a directory services company, a wholesaler of bathroom fittings,  a social events guide, an oceanographic data centre and the pan-European library initiative have in common? They all need to offer their clients the ability to search and filter results within a flexible geographic area, defined by the user.

With a variety of businesses needing to customize search results to the preferences of a narrowly targeted audience, there’s an increasing demand for incorporating geographical location information into standard search functionality.

In response, JTeam has recently launched the Solr Spatial Plugin (SSP): a free, standalone, enterprise-ready plugin enabling location based search, built on top of the open source project Apache Solr.

It’s main characteristics are:

• Provide a complete, consistent, robust and fast implementation of advanced geospatial algorithms
• Act as a standalone pluggable extension to Solr
• Written in 100% Java
• Compatible with Apache Solr and Lucene  1
• Open source
• Well documented and comes with support
• Enterprise ready

SSP started out its life as a patch for Solr Spatial Search (Solr-773) and Spatial Lucene (Lucene-1732) and extends Solr and Lucene with previously missing geodetic search functions while improving on the speed of the result and performance when dealing with a large data set.  It does this through better query parsing and multi-threaded filtering; also included are improved extensibility and documentation.

The author of the SSP plugin- JTeam Search specialist Chris Male – explains the technical underpinnings in his earlier blog on Geo-location Search.

General information on the SSP including the Roadmap and  FAQ is  available on the JTeam website.

While the plugin is freely downloadable, JTeam provides installation and configuration support on the SSP as well as annual support contracts for both SSP and Solr.

JTeam can also create customized versions of the SSP, tailored to your needs.

Download the SSP

Contact JTeam for SSP Support and Customization options

1 SSP is currently compatible with Solr 1.4 & Lucene 2.9

Introduction to Solr is a 3 day instructor-led hands-on in-classroom training course, written by the engineers who helped write the Lucene/Solr code and led by JTeam’s certified trainers. The objective of this course is to provide you with real use cases and teach you how to apply Solr search engine technologies to business requirements. During the course you will learn to apply best practices developing scalable, high availability and high performance search applications. View the course description.

This course is taught in collaboration with Lucid Imagination, the first commercial entity offering official training and support on Apache Solr and Lucene. Upon successful completion of the course, participants receive certification from Lucid.

Stay tuned for upcoming Lucene training dates.

Signup now for Solr training on 30th Nov. -2 Dec., or contact JTeam for more  information.