Apache Solr 3.1 released

It’s been a long wait, and now it’s here – the release of Solr version 3.1. The 1.4.1 release was in June 2010, and for various reasons there was never a 1.4.2 nor a 1.5 release. Part of the reason is the merge of Lucene and Solr codebase which is also why the version number is 3.1 instead of 1.5.

So what’s new? For me, the single most important features are the Extended Dismax parser (SOLR-1553) and Geospatial search. The full list of improvements is found in CHANGES.TXT, but here are my favorites:

Solr does GEO search

gisApache Solr is a very capable enterprise search platform, doing most things you would expect from such a solution. But what about GEO sensitive applications like Yellow-pages, maps search, sort by distance to X etc? The big commercial systems such as FAST, Autonomy and Endecca, have it but Apache Lucene/Solr does not seem to support GEO search, or what?