Apache Solr doesn't just provide a fast, sacalable search platform with lots of powerful features; it does all of that with style. 

But what is it that makes Solr so sexy?  That question was the subject of an interesting and quite useful presentation at ApacheCon NA 2011 by Erik Hatcher, an ASF member an active committer on the Lucene and Solr projects. 

The bottom line

You haven't experienced the full power of the Solr platform until you've explored what it has to offer in the way of state of the art user interfaces and interactions. 

To give you an idea of what that means, here's a list of some of the topics covered in the presentation:

• Live systems that leverage Ajax Suggest
• “Instant” search and preview
• Did you mean?
• Spell checking
• Faceting
• Filtering, grouping, and clustering

The presentation also covers charts, maps and timelines generated from data that Solr indexes.  If you want to follow along, look below for the slides.