Solr vs Hibernate Search - Which to choose and When?

Question

We are building an ecommerce application. We are using JAVA stack with Hibernate and Spring Framework. As with all ecommerce application, we need to build search capability

Answer 1

Hibernate search is a "bridge" between Hibernate and Lucene. In other words, it makes persisted Hibernate entities automagically searchable in Lucene index.

Solr is a framework built on top of Lucene (both projects are supposed to be merged one day, but it's a long way to go). Differences between Solr and Lucene are explained in another SO post.