How is Magento Solr used?
Magento Solr is one of the possible solutions to optimize the standard search of Magento CMS. It is released by developers of the Apache Lucene project. Standard Magento search is good, but you always want something better. Magento Solr is the integration of Solr search engine, open source software written in Java in CMS Magento. Using of Magento Solr will give you access to a powerful, full-text highlight search and relevant search results. In order to take advantage of Magento Solr you need to buy one of Magento Solr extensions that will integrate the engine into your website. For example, you can search for the Solr extensions on the official website of Magento.
Apache Solr is a standalone, enterprise-grade search platform built on top of the Apache Lucene library. It runs as a separate Java application (typically on its own server or alongside your web server) and communicates with Magento via HTTP requests. When integrated with Magento, product data is pushed to the Solr index whenever products are created, updated, or reindexed. When a customer performs a search on the storefront, the query is sent to Solr instead of being processed by MySQL. Solr then returns matching results based on its own optimized index, which Magento formats and displays to the customer. This separation of concerns means that search operations no longer compete with other database queries for MySQL resources.
The advantages of Solr over Magento's default MySQL-based search are substantial, especially for stores with large catalogs. MySQL full-text search becomes increasingly slow as the product catalog grows and struggles with features like fuzzy matching, synonyms, and relevance tuning. Solr, by contrast, is purpose-built for search and handles these tasks efficiently even with millions of documents. It supports advanced features such as faceted search (allowing customers to filter results by attributes like price, brand, or color), spell checking and "did you mean" suggestions, synonym mapping (so that searching for "laptop" also returns results for "notebook"), stemming (matching "running" with "run" and "runner"), and configurable relevance boosting that lets you prioritize certain products or attributes in search results.
Setting up Solr for Magento involves several steps. First, you need a server environment with Java installed (Java 8 or later is typically required). Solr can be downloaded from the official Apache Solr website and started as a standalone service. Once Solr is running, you need to create a core (also called a collection) that will hold your Magento product data, along with a schema that defines which product fields should be indexed and how they should be analyzed. Most Magento-Solr integration extensions provide pre-configured schema files that handle this setup automatically. After installing and configuring the extension in Magento, you point it to your Solr instance (typically at http://localhost:8983/solr) and run a full reindex to populate the Solr index with your product catalog data.
When planning a Magento Solr deployment, there are a few practical considerations to keep in mind. Solr requires its own server resources — primarily RAM, as it keeps its index in memory for fast access. For most small to mid-size Magento stores, 1 to 2 GB of dedicated RAM for Solr is sufficient, but very large catalogs with hundreds of thousands of products may require more. You should also set up monitoring for the Solr service to ensure it stays running and responsive, as search will fail if the Solr instance goes down. For high-availability setups, Solr supports replication and, in newer versions, SolrCloud mode for distributed indexing and automatic failover. It is worth noting that Magento 2 Enterprise Edition (now Adobe Commerce) includes Elasticsearch as its built-in search engine, which serves a similar role to Solr. For Magento 1 and Magento 2 Community Edition stores, however, Solr remains an excellent choice for upgrading search quality and performance.