[Koha] Solr

[Jared Camins-Esakov]

Stacy,

I'll address the points that are not answered in the proposal that Brooke
linked to.

Does anyone know if switching from Zebra to Solr will let Koha
> libraries use a stopwords list?
>

Solr allows the use of stopwords (as would a decent query parser such as
the one I propose writing). However, the Solr code in Koha right now does
not make use of the stopwords feature. To my mind, that is a good thing. If
we used stopwords, the poetry journal The would be unfindable (and yes,
there is such a journal: I had a nightmare and a half trying to find the
record when I had an issue to catalog at the NYPL; thankfully their catalog
doesn't throw away stopwords anymore). And things would be even worse when
searching for French books. Consider the case of the À thé and Le thé. In
the US we would probably search for "a the" and "le the." If someone can


> Also, will Solr have any effect on fuzzy searching defaults?
>

It will. Fuzzy searching has completely different semantics in Solr
compared to Zebra. We briefly noted that fact in the proposal, along with a
footnote identifying the algorithms that Solr uses for fuzzy searching
(and, yes, I am aware that the second algorithm listed is generally used as
an alternate name for the first... I have no explanation of why the Solr
docs used the two names like they were different). Whether the "fuzzy"
behavior is closer to what you want I could not say. My personal
preference, like yours, is to not be fuzzy, and just suggest better
searches.

Lastly, is there anyone sponsoring or working on a "did you mean..."
> opac response to zero retrieval searches?   At our library, we'd
> probably choose a "did you mean..." spelling suggestion choice over
> the automatic fuzzy spelling assumptions that are currently in the
> system.   I realize this would probably be listed in bugzilla, but I'm
> not sure exactly how to search for this.
>

We have not yet added bugs for the various parts of the search rewrite.

Regards,
Jared

-- 
Jared Camins-Esakov
Bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC
(phone) +1 (917) 727-3445
(e-mail) jcamins at cpbibliography.com
(web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/