Data and query structure for faceted styles search

[momijizukamori]

I have been researching this, and while I've found a lot of articles on how to set up faceted searching using existing search engines (mostly Solr, though a few with Sphinx), and a bunch of articles on frontend design for faceted search.... there is not a lot on optimizing data structure or queries that I can find. And I know basically nothing about code optimization so - tossing this out here!

( Data structures )

( Query Structure )

Tragically the already existing options are 'use Solr', 'use something written on a Java server backend', or 'use a client-side Javascript library (which won't work with JS off and will probably not work on a 1300+ collection, but we didn't stress-test it to see)'