Wrap-up of the Solr Usability Contest

The Solr Usability Contest has finished. It run for four weeks, has received 29 suggestions, 113 votes and more than 300 visits. People from several different Solr communities participated.

The final list of suggestions (sorted by votes) is:

  1. Better documentation (13 votes)
  2. Make atomic updates really atomic (11 vote)
  3. Automatically redistribute documents across shards when more shards are added to a collection (11 vote)
  4. Make dashboard more interactive and configurable (9 votes)
  5. Make it easy to visualize Solr configuration (8 votes)
  6. Admin tool for testing relevance (6 votes)
  7. Add scripting capability (5 votes)
  8. A tool for analyzing search components (4 votes)
  9. An aggregator for Solr consultancy companies (4 votes)
  10. A directory of tools/libraries/frameworks that work with Solr (4 votes)
  11. Indexing and search of multilingual document (4 votes)
  12. Evolving Solr for Recommendation engine side. (3 votes)
  13. More complex example texts to allow examples beyond what is already provided. (3 votes)
  14. A list of all UpdateRequestProcessors (3 votes)
  15. Puppet/Chef configuration to automatically setup Solr under configuration management (3 votes)
  16. A troubleshooting Solr book/tutorial (3 votes)
  17. Solr Lint - a tool to check Solr configuration and detect issues (3 votes)
  18. User/group ACLs + Authentication on Solr’s API calls (2 votes)
  19. A paste service with Solr awareness (2 votes)
  20. Public instance of Solr with example configs (2 votes)
  21. Solr and Tika integration to index pdf/doc/odf files (2 votes)
  22. Prediction using SOLR documents (1 vote)
  23. More examples for Solr with Ajax (1 vote)
  24. Solr multi-book index (1 vote)
  25. Mailing list for Solr integrators (owners of 3rd party Solr clients) (1 vote)
  26. A Solr learning virtual machine (1 vote)
  27. Hello Solr example in all the 3rd party libraries (1 vote)
  28. Interactive builder for schema files (1 vote)
  29. Dictionaries for DictionaryCompoundWordTokenFilterFactory (1 vote)

The following five people’s suggestions were voted on most and - therefore - they won an electronic copy of my book Instant Apache Solr for Indexing Data How-to :

What happens next? I am about to move countries (Canada to Thailand). Once I am settled, I will start going through the suggestions one by one and documenting what resources are available and what is the best way to move the issues forward. I will create JIRA support requests where required.

If you have any additional information or would like to write yourself in-depth on any of the topics above, please feel free to contact me and I will link to your post. My goal here is improved Solr experience and many hands make light work. In a meanwhile, follow me on Twitter to get updates.