Here’s the official description of the talk I’ll be giving at RubyNation 2012:
Rails and the Apache Solr Search Engine
What good is content if nobody can find it? Many information sites are like icebergs, with only a limited amount of content directly accessible to users and the rest, the “underwater” portion, only available through searches. This talk will show how Rails web sites can take advantage of the world-class Apache Solr search engine to provide sophisticated and customizable search features. We’ll cover how to get started with Solr, integrating with Solr using the Sunspot gem, indexing (including both documents and data within a database), and both basic and advanced search techniques. Along the way, we’ll also cover some best practices and some architectural recommendations.