can GSA use data indexed by Apache Solr for search as a combined solution

Question

It is observed that google does not provide good indexing through its enterprise search solution Google Search Appliance . But Apache solr has a good indexing capability. Can we use apache solr to index documents and then those documents be searched through GSA server . So that we can get best of the both world. Kindly give your thoughts ??

Answer 1

Can you please provide more details on why you think the GSA "does not provide good indexing"?

The GSA is generally recognised as being the best or at least one of the best when it comes to result relevancy. When it comes to non-web content, Google supply multiple connectors to allow you to index this content in the GSA and if you have a content source that is neither web based or covered by one of the Google connectors it is not difficult to write your own. So I'm not sure why you think the indexing is not good, it would be really helpful if you could elaborate.

Mohan is incorrect when he says that you cannot serve Solr content via a GSA, you certainly can do this. What you will need to do is create a onebox module so that you can federate Solr results in realtime and they will be presented to the right of the main GSA results.

Answer 2

What is your data source?

If it is a website crawl,to my little knowledge GSA provides sophisticated crawling/indexing capability for websites than Solr. Because Solr needs external toolkit such as Tika or Nutch for crawling web resources. On the other hand GSA has its own crawler which makes crawling simple and effective.

Regarding your question on indexing through Solr and serving through GSA, it is possible through onebox module.(Refer BigMikeW's answer)

If you can provide some information about your data sources, it might help people to suggest the best solution to increase indexing capability in GSA.