What are the advantages of using solr over Lucene .Net?

Question

We are trying to incorporate full-text search into our product. When searching for comparisons of lucene and solr i found that most people mention the obvious difference that lucene (and lucene .Net) is a library, while solr is an application. Some people also mentioned solr features such as hit highlighting, but the lucene .Net contrib library seems to support them as well. The only feature i have seen that is supported in solr and not in lucene is document field typing.

Using Lucene .Net will make our deployment process easier (our product runs on IIS) so we are inclined to use Lucene .NET over solr. However, we would like to know what exactly we would be missing if we do not use solr. I would appreciate some details of each feature / advantage as opposed to a simple list.

Answer 1

Have a look at this link : http://www.solrtutorial.com/overview/solr-for-managers.html

As you said, SOLR is an application, meaning you won't have to implement this (for example) :

• search result highlighting
• database integration
• searching of binary documents such as Word and PDF

By implementing I mean calling Lucene.API to use those features.

Basically :

• Using SOLR means calling index and search commands to a REST service.
• Using Lucene.NET means writing code to manage index creation, data indexing (Lucene does not know how to index Word files), and so on.