This is an excerpt from my original article published on labs.edelight-group.com

When preparing external product data for search, you have to decide how much you want to pre-process and how much you want to do at query time on the Lucene level (Solr/Elasticsearch).

Basically your data import saves data into your storage backend, which then gets synced into a search index:

You can continue reading at labs.edelight-group.com