Some of the most enjoyable Drupal moments for me was the time I spent in 2009  testing Acquia's Search for Drupal. Acquia Search is a plug-and-play service within the Acquia Network, built on Apache Solr and available for any Drupal 6 site.

I think Acquia Search is probably one of the most significant services provided on the Acquia Network and the feature that will continue to attract businesses to not only Acquia but also Drupal. So although I'm no longer on the Acquia network, I'm pleased to hear that new features have been added to this Apache Solr implementation.

Some of the more significant features being added to Acquia Search include:

• Attachment Indexing - Utilizing the Apache Solr Attachment module you can now search the text in document files such as PDF and Word documents. This is big! Even cooler, those documents can searched locally or remotely.
• Multi-site Searches - Search multiple Drupal sites at once.
• Update to Solr 1.4.1 which fixes a number of bugs.
• Wildcard Searches
  

While I was at DrupalCon last week, Chris Pliakas sent a tweet out that he used screenshots from CMS Report in his Apache Lucene presentation. I'm always flattered when this site gets noticed for something we're apparently doing right. In this particular case, we're using the contributed Drupal module Search Lucene API for our search engine as well as for faceted search and content recommendations (recommended links).

If you had talked to me a few years ago, I would have told you that the Search module that comes with the Drupal CMS is all a site like mine needs. After I became a beta tester for the Acquia Network along with their implementation of Apache Solr called Acquia Search, my opinion quickly changed. I'm now convinced that an enterprise quality search engine is truly something that can make or break your website. If you're a smaller Drupal site that feels like Solr or Acquia Search is overkill or not in your cost range, Search Lucene API may be the answer you've been looking for all this time.

The actual name of Chris' DrupalCon presentation is: Build a Powerful Site Search with the User-Friendly, Easy-to-Install Search Lucene API Module Suite. The video of his presentation can be viewed at Archive.org and has been embedded above. Screenshots from CMSReport.com can be seen in the time frame from 19 minutes to 21 minutes.

A couple days ago, Acquia moved Acquia Search out of beta and made it available commercially available through their Acquia Network service. Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The technology supporting Acquia Search is based on the the Open Source Lucene and Solr distributions from the Apache project.  While a free search module is already available in Drupal, as well as Acquia Drupal, Acquia Search is significantly different and geared toward the enterprise. Smaller but high traffic websites would also benefit from Acquia Search.

CMS Report has been beta testing Acquia Search for the past four months and we've had nothing but a positive experience with the service. In fact I feel as a beta tester I somehow didn't do my job since I didn't have any issues to report to Acquia. However, Acquia did acquire various usage statistics, email exchanges, and surveys from us that they still benefited from CMSReport.com's participation in the beta program. Since I know only enough about Drupal to be dangerous, if I can't break it then Acquia must be on the right track with this product.

Acquia used the first day of DrupalCon DC as well as their corporate site to announce the availability of their new service via a public beta program, Acquia Search. Acquia Search is "based on the powerful Lucene and Solr technologies from the Apache project" and "creates a rich index of your site content".  While Apache Lucene and Apache Solr are "free" and open source, the implementation and maintenance of these products can be rather daunting.  Acquia wishes to solve this complexity problem by offering Solr search as a service in their Acquia Network.

Before the beta was available to the public, CMSReport.com was invited by Jacob Singh to join the private beta program to test and review Acquia Search. I have only been using Acquia Search for a week so I still have some learning to do in order to take full advantage of the advanced configuration options in Apache Solr.  Although I'm new to Apache Solr,  I have to say that from a website owner's perspective the implementation of Apache Search was extremely easy.  After I signed up for the service on the network, implementing Acquia Search within the Acquia Drupal CMS was just a matter of activating the appropriate modules and waiting for my content to be indexed by the server.  Acquia Search works straight "out of the box" and I couldn't have asked for anything simpler.