The last decade has seen our consumption of information skyrocket, but our capacity to manually organize our digital life simply crumble.
Think of it: ten years ago, we would create folders to organize our files, our music, our mail, but nowadays, we simply store our information into generic folders, and as long as each piece of information is properly tagged, we let the search engines organize our life. One could argue that this was predictable, because this is how the brain works. But there has been several formal studies on the subject, so this evolution wasn’t completely blind.
One of the key ingredients of Drupal’s success is the concept of generic nodes and attributes which we don’t care how and where they are stored. What is important is the capacity to retrieve information using parameters, through the Search and Views modules.
Drupal’s core search module can be replaced with Apache Solr, a web service which includes the Lucene engine also powering Alfresco. On web sites where Alfresco is used to store documents, this has the advantage of bringing one uniform search syntax to every search query. Furthermore, since Solr is called via a REST interface, you can install it on dedicated server, which means that your website performance won’t degrade during periods where the search activity is more intense.
