Acquia launches enterprise search for Drupal

July 2, 2009:A hosted Search service that can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 website has been launched by Acquia, the company that offers enterprise support for the open source content management system.

Search was released into beta in March 2009 and provides support for enterprise-scale site indexing and navigation.

By leveraging faceted search navigation, content recommendations and configurable results weighting, Acquia Search creates a rich index of site content and dramatically improves end-user search experience.

Results can be navigated based on date, author, taxonomy, term, content type, or other built-in/customizable categories. Acquia promises search capabilities up to ten times faster than native Drupal search - an increasingly important function as businesses work to keep visitors actively and meaningfully engaged on sites longer.

"Acquia Search provides great value, both for site visitors and administrators, supercharging a Drupal site’s search capabilities and eliminating the drain on infrastructure and administration," said Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project and Acquia CTO.

"For visitors it all comes down to better user experience; Acquia Search makes it faster and easier to find content on your site, yielding more accurate results and recommendations encouraging visitors to stay longer on the site. For site administrators, Acquia Search offers the enterprise-quality, highly-available, secure, scalable, and fast indexing search solution that Drupal was missing. And because Acquia Search is offered as a hosted solution, it’s simple to install, and requires no expertise to deploy, manage and scale.”

Delivering the capabilities of Lucene and Solr technologies from the Apache project, Acquia Search can be implemented as a web service for Drupal websites of any size. Acquia Search is built on a redundant hosted service infrastructure, with no servers to deploy or manage. The platform actively follows and contributes to the development of the Solr application and manages service performance and backups automatically.

Acquia Search features and functionality include:Faceted search - enable your visitors to find information faster by clicking search filters that refine the search resultsResults sorting - enable your visitors to sort their search results by date, type, authorResults weighting - improve the relevance of search results by weighting certain results higher than others by using fine-grained controlsContent recommendations - suggest additional related content alongside of search results and increase visitor time on your siteFaster performance - improve site response times and lower abandon rates by offering a faster search experience than Drupal's built-in search.

A basic level of Acquia Search is included free with any Acquia Network subscription. Additional search capacity is available for purchase.