I wanted to clarify the point I tried to make in my blog post about Bobo and LinkedIn’s use of faceted search. I ended that post with a confusing question about faceted search framework in Lucene, and was quickly reminded by Bob Carpenter and others that Solr provides that capability. My comment was poorly made.

My comment about facets was related to programming the interface rather than to retrieval algorithms. It seems to me that a good, interactive interface for faceted browsing is every bit as complicated to build as a  good engine for finding the facets in the first place. Lately I’ve been messing around with Javascript programming, and am getting frustrated by the seemingly unnecessary complexity of building web user interfaces that are both efficient and effective.

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