This is the single biggest problem I've been having with the term "faceted search": I can't find a single, universally agreed upon definition of exactly what it means!

But I really need it to have one, because it's a key feature of the software I am building.

If there's a more widely accepted term for my version of it - filters with displayed counts - I'd love to know about it.

As it is, most people have never heard the term anyway.

Daniel Tunkelang wrote a book on Faceted Search that is pretty good, turns out he's also on Medium https://dtunkelang.medium.com/facets-of-faceted-search-38c3e... not sure if he's on HN.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm not usually on HN, but I just discovered this thread and am happy to contribute if I have anything useful to add. The book is a bit dated, but I have continued to post about search more broadly on Medium, particularly on the topic of query understanding.

I saw him give a great keynote and have been a fan of faceted search for years but did not know that. Learn something new every day

I also think of faceted search of having the counts and narrowing the options as you drill down.

Ironically enough that was through Endeca which was introduced to my company (at great expense) as I was pushing for solr. Eventually solr became the tool of choice because it was more flexible and less cumbersome.

Endeca was killed by Oracle.

I recently completed an Endeca to Algolia migration. I spent quite a bit of time auditing the Endeca implementation, from the XML files to the Windows desktop application. It was pretty good for its era.

While the acquisition was good for me financially, I agree that Oracle didn't really invest in sustaining Endeca as a product. I am proud of what we achieved at Endeca, but search has come a long way since then.

Coincidentally, I now consult for Algolia. :-)

Cool, I thought I was the only one who has uttered Endeca and Algolia in the same sentence.

I wrote up some tips/impressions on configuring Algolia for ecomm:

https://www.avikaminetzky.dev/posts/algolia-ecommerce-nextjs

I’d argue the beauty of faceted search is that it doesn’t require predefined categories, which (eg if using something like datasette) helps to explore the data even if it’s a new dataset

Last time I used solr the facets were defined in the schema so Lucene could create and index on that field.

The facets need to be defined but their possible values are computed from the data and don’t need to be predefined. These are also recomputed based on existing filters.