[3] Solr is widely used for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases.

Solr's external configuration allows it to be tailored to many types of applications without Java coding, and it has a plugin architecture to support more advanced customization.

In 2004, Solr was created by Yonik Seeley at CNET Networks as an in-house project to add search capability for the company website.

[4] In January 2006, CNET Networks decided to openly publish the source code by donating it to the Apache Software Foundation.

[5] Like any new Apache project, it entered an incubation period that helped solve organizational, legal, and financial issues.

In January 2007, Solr graduated from incubation status into a standalone top-level project (TLP) and grew steadily with accumulated features, thereby attracting users, contributors, and committers.

[7] In January 2009, Yonik Seeley along with Grant Ingersoll and Erik Hatcher joined Lucidworks (formerly Lucid Imagination), the first company providing commercial support and training for Apache Solr search technologies.

Hadoop distributions from Cloudera,[25] Hortonworks[26] and MapR all bundle Solr as the search engine for their products marketed for big data.

For ease of use there are also client libraries available for Java, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby and most other popular programming languages.