I am currently looking into finding a search device that can facilitate a lot of documents and a few different websites and an LMS.
Where this differs is that we would like there to be a heavy amount of relevancy based on user roles. Everyone is auto-logged into all of our systems via SSO much like this site. We want heavy weighting to be put on documents, web site articles/knowledgebase, and class in the LMS that are for that user's selected role.
I personally have limited knowledge of solr which we use for some full text searches. I have considered looking into elasticsearch, solr, google appliance, and FAST.
Do any of these have any innate features that will help me get to my end goal faster? My worries about elasticsearch and solr is the amount of development time. Our group has done limited search customization so also wondering on dev time needed for various solutions.
You must have not done much research yet, because FAST is gone (absorbed by Microsoft) and Google Appliance is not very customizable.
Solr is more customizable than Elasticsearch, so that's my recommendation. For the rest, I would start by having the field for a role and then using that as a boost factor.
If the basic approach does not work, the Solr-Users mailing list may actually be a better place to follow-up as it allows a discussion to fine tune the issue.
(Updated)
For more packaged solutions that integrate with Solr and include crawling, you can look at:
And probably more, if you dig a little bit.