Is Solr a user friendly search platform?

Answer 1

Of course, that depends on what is meant by "user friendly". SOLR provides an HTTP interface. This means that if you are comfortable with working with URLs and manipulating the URL parameters it is friendly. SOLR can return results in a number of standard formats (e.g., XML, JSON) so if you are comfortable with these formats it is friendly.

Depending on your familiarity with setting up server software you could argue that this may be one of the "user unfriendly" areas of SOLR. Apache has done a nice job in packaging SOLR but you would still need some knowledge of server software to get it set up (server software e.g., Apache web server, Tomcat/Jetty servlet containers). They provide a nice tutorial for getting started quickly. Perhaps reading it would give you an idea of how your level of computer knowledge matches its friendliness: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html