Architecture of the Catalog Search of an Online Store - Valuable Resources

I'm currently working on an online store and I'm curious if there are any "best practices" that I should consider to attain subsecond (or close to) search operations. I'm using Full Text Search in Sql Server 2008 which I'm sure I could optimi开发者_StackOverflowze in various ways. Right now, searches within Management Studio alone are taking 2-3 seconds roughly. Furthermore, I'm curious if client or server-side caching of some sort could be utilized. The database for the catalog contains millions of records. Does anyone know how Amazon.com or Borders.com return search results so quickly? Are there any books or articles that discuss search optimization and architecture? This isn't to be confused with search-engine optimization. Right now, I don't care about how visible the site is to the public.

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Those websites use full text search or IR libraries. Apache Lucene is an open source framework that perfectly meets your needs. These information retrieval or IR libraries use inverted-index to obtain better search performance trading the index creation time. Also look for using Facets and collaborative filtering (the suggestion list you see on amazon) using Taste.

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www.acm.org/dl &computer.org & searchenginewatch & microsoft/enterprisesearch whitepapers & lucidimagination & autonomy & endeca

All of these resources publish consumable information that is both useful and not always too obscure nor facile.

You can get the task done with MSSQL 2008 but you need to spend more time than a question on stackO can get you. |imho| Note: Its fine to explore the implementation issues before you architect, but its not always a good idea to bring those implementation details into the architecture.