The new Lulu 2008.4 release brought the usual amount of bug fixes, but the new feature released was a new search engine based on Solr. You don’t have to know what Solr is or why it’s important, but what you will notice is a new search box in the results displayed from your query that looks like this:

This new search box is contextual in nature, meaning that features are only displayed in response to your actions. This means you have a powerful arsenal of search options, but the screen isn’t cluttered with check boxes and drop-down menus. To try it out for yourself, just search for anything on Lulu. You’ll see the new search box at the top of your results.

In addition to the snazzy new interface, we made plenty of other changes that will help shoppers better find what they are looking for. Some of these improvements include:

• ability to search using accented characters (i.e.: à,è,ö,ñ)
  
• ability to filter results by user rating
  
• ability to filter results by publication date
• ability to filter results by language or country of the published work
• ability to search within a category (science fiction,
  romance, etc.)
• incremental indexing – this means projects are available for searching minutes after being published

Have you had a chance to see the new Lulu Search in action? Let us know what you think by commenting on this post.