Demo shop with Solr search

Question

Is there a Magento demo instance with the Magento Enterprise Solr search activated?

I was guessing http://enterprise-demo.magentocommerce.com/ might have activated this feature but did not find out if Solr is activated. In the admin backend, access to the system configuration is disallowed.

Answer 1

Objectively - there is no real way to know. The Solr search integration is entirely via the back end and exposes very few features to the frontend on-site search that are different from the MySQL Fulltext variant. These two features are:

• Misspelling / Spelling suggestion ("did you mean" functionality)
• Related Search Terms

Because both of these features have to be enabled separately, you could, in theory, drive your search and layered navigation, even your category pages from Solr, but have no tell-tale signs on the frontend.

However, subjectively, my gut feel is that it is enabled. My not-so-scientific reasons:

• AJAX search dropdown is fast. I had suggestions in 330ms on my initial test.
• Category pages are quick, too - I got a 1.85s onload when using the no_cache querystring parameter on Apparel
• "Related Search Terms" appear for items that don't have explicit results:
• Wouldn't you want your demo store for a $15k annual subscription product to be best-of-breed?

Update:

The default port for Solr is 8983 - a simple curl to this port returns:

Authorizeds-MacBook-Pro:~ pjackson$ curl -I http://enterprise-demo.magentocommerce.com:8983/solr
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://enterprise-demo.magentocommerce.com:8983/solr/
Content-Length: 0
Server: Jetty(6.1.3)

Jetty is running on this box, and Solr is definitely installed. Curl to the root domain on 8983 reveals that /solr is the only context known to Jetty. The presence of Solr/Jetty on this box isn't conclusive proof, but I'll take is as a pretty good indicator that they're using Solr.