Fast multi-tag search plus result ordering and paging?

Question

Can somebody explain how StackOverflow search works? I would like to add same features to a project I'm working on.

In SO, it's possible to filter the questions by multiple tags (e.g. c#, java) and get results sorted/paged by date or number of votes?

I realize that RDBMS with full-text engine can be used to filter and sort the questions but I'm not sure if that's the best solution?

Is it possible to somehow get top N ordered results from a full-text index?

Maybe Lucene.NET or Redis or something similar is used?

RavenDB uses Lucene internally and offers paging, sorting etc. Also it stored your documents in a robust way, which Lucene isn't really suitable for. So you might want to take a look and see if it fits your needs, see http://ravendb.net/ — Matt Warren, May 23 '11 at 08:59

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 18 '21 at 12:38

4

Source: (Jeff Atwood) https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/stack-overflow-search-now-81-less-crappy/

edited Jan 18 '21 at 12:38

Community

answered May 22 '11 at 19:12

Brian Webster

Thanks. Do you know how to implement efficient paging and custom ordering with Lucene? – Marko May 23 '11 at 06:06
Nope, sure don't -- but that would make a great stackoverflow question – Brian Webster May 23 '11 at 06:12

1 Answers1