Today was the go-live for ANWB's new Car Portal. The main application we call "Search & Compare". Even if you don't speak dutch, you should be able to try it on http://www.anwb.nl/auto and click on the banner in the upper left of the screen. (or go directly to this link)
The technology for this is based on the Google Search Appliance (GSA). It contains approximately 200,000 cars with many detailed metadata fields to search on. Most people only consider the GSA for unstructured text search. The new Search & Compare application proves that GSA also works well for structured queries. For more documentation on how to do this, see this link on Google's site.
One of the advantages of GSA is easy maintenance and administration. You don't have to think too much about complicated configurations specific for indexing and search solutions (like you need for Lucene). All you have to do, is to create an XML content feed containing lots of meta fields as described in Google's documentation.
Then the last step is to create your own front end. I have to admit: that does require a lot of work. With just an XSLT running inside the GSA, you won't get the results we get in our Search & Compare application. What you can do, is ask the GSA for output in XML by adding &output=xml or &output=xml_no_dtd to the GET request. Then you can use XSLT in your own front-end to create your own screens!
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