What is the Heliosearch project?

The Heliosearch project is the next generation of open source search. The idea is to take the best of Solr and reengineer it into a significantly faster, high-performance architecture.

What is the difference between Heliosearch and HDS?

HDS (Heliosearch Distribution for Solr) is 100% pure Apache Solr packaged and optimized to run on Tomcat. It is certified for production use and freely downloadable from our .com website.

The Heliosearch project, on the other hand, is an entirely new Open Source initiative altogether. Led by Yonik Seeley (the original creator of Solr), this new project is the next generation of Solr.

What is the current state of Heliosearch?

Heliosearch is currently a drop-in replacement for Solr at the HTTP API level. The current enhancements include:

• off-heap field cache
• off-heap filters
• facet functions and facet statistics
• subfacets / nested facets and aggregations
• native code faceting
• streaming aggregations
• JSON Facet API
• JSON Request API

See the Downloads and Release Notes page for more details.

Sounds good. How do I get involved?

We are truly humbled by the tremendous outpouring of support we have received thus far from the community. If you’d like to contribute code, advice, ideas, or documentation to the Solr/Heliosearch project, please visit Project for information on how to get started.