# Public search at country scale

> Search a citizen can use: a polling place, a beneficiary record, found in hundreds of millions of rows.

## The problem

Two public systems had to answer a person, not an analyst. One helped voters find a polling station and a voting date across on the order of hundreds of millions of records. The other searched health-insurance beneficiaries, with grouping and autosuggest so a near-match still led somewhere.

## The approach

Both sat on Apache Solr. The useful design was the lookup a person could finish, including bilingual web search on a separate state site, not a cluster diagram.

## Subjects

- [Enterprise search](https://oppority.com/topics/enterprise-search.md)
- [Apache Solr](https://oppority.com/topics/apache-solr.md)

## The conclusion

At that size the interface is the product. If the person cannot tell they found the right row, the index does not matter.