First, I wanted to humbly thank the Solr community for their contributions and feedback for our open source Solr sandbox, Splainer (http://splainer.io and http://github.com/o19s/splainer). The reception and comments have been generally positive and helpful, and I very much appreciate being part of such a great open source community that wants to support each other.
What is Splainer exactly? Why should you care? Nobody likes working with Solr in the browser's URL bar. Splainer let's you paste in your Solr URL and get an instant, easy to understand breakdown of why some documents are ranked higher than others. It then gives you a friendly interface to tweak Solr params and experiment with different ideas with a friendlier UI than trying to parse through XML and JSON. You needn't worry about security rules so that some splainer backend needing to talk to your Solr. The interaction with Solr is 100% through your browser. If your PC can see Solr, then so can Splainer running in your browser. If you leave work or turn off the VPN, then Splainer can't see your Solr. It's all running locally on your machine through the browser! I wanted to share that we've been slowly adding features to Splainer. The two I wanted to highlight, are captured in this blog article ( http://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2015/07/24/splainer-a-solr-developers-best-friend/ ) To summarize, they include - Explain Other You often wonder why obviously relevant search results don't come back. Splainer now gives you the ability to compare any document to secondary document to see what factors caused one document to rank higher than another - Share Splainerized Solr Results Once you paste a Solr URL into Splainer, you can then copy the splainer.io URL to share what you're seeing with a colleague. For example, here's some information about Virginia state laws about hunting deer from a boat: http://splainer.io/#?solr=http:%2F%2Fsolr.quepid.com%2Fsolr%2Fstatedecoded%2Fselect%3Fq%3Ddeer%20hunt%20from%20watercraft%0A%26defType%3Dedismax%0A%26qf%3Dcatch_line%20text%0A%26bq%3Dtitle:deer There's many more smaller features and tweaks, but I wanted to let you know this was out there. I hope you find Splainer useful. I'm very happy to field pull requests, ideas, suggestions, or try to figure out why Splainer isn't working for you! Cheers! -- *Doug Turnbull **| *Search Relevance Consultant | OpenSource Connections <http://opensourceconnections.com>, LLC | 240.476.9983 Author: Relevant Search <http://manning.com/turnbull> This e-mail and all contents, including attachments, is considered to be Company Confidential unless explicitly stated otherwise, regardless of whether attachments are marked as such.
