High-performance Solr search and facets for DOGA

The context

DOGA is a French specialist in industrial tools and solutions, designing, manufacturing and selling its equipment internationally. Its Drupal site exposes a rich product catalogue — and on an industrial catalogue, search is not a nicety: it is the main conversion path.

The problem

Two friction points weighed on both the experience and the infrastructure:

• search ran on Search API Database: fine for a small site, but slow and weakly relevant at product-catalogue scale;
• the range-filtering slider (the facet_range_slider sub-module of the Facets module) generated expensive queries and a laborious filtering experience.

What I did

• Installed and configured Apache Solr on the server, then switched from Search API Database to Search API Solr: dedicated indexing, tunable relevance, headroom to scale.
• Built a custom facets module, optimised for speed and performance, designed as an alternative to the facet_range_slider sub-module — a smoother filtering experience with a reduced server load.

The result

Search results that are faster, more relevant and scalable, responsive range filtering, and a server relieved of expensive search queries — all without changing anything for the editorial teams.