[raybb]

Could this also work as an alternative to Apache Solr? If so might be worth while to market it that way a bit.

I don't really know much about Solr but just started using it while helping with a project for openlibrary.org and it seems pretty alright but I'm still not totally sure I understand what makes it popular.

[rdhatt]

Solr and Elasticsearch are both Java servers built on top of the Java search library Lucene. There are plenty of articles on the internet describing how they differ. However since they share the same core, so they are very similar as well. For the context of this discussion, you can consider Solr & Elasticsearch as interchangeable - a potayto, potahto situation.