Parse.ly is a rich, adaptive web application that discovers your unique interests to filter and prioritize content from countless news and blog sources on the web. This talk will introduce Parse.ly with a quick demo and then delve right into how the Parse.ly engineering team makes use of the Solr open source search engine. This will include discussion of initial design mistakes that were later revised and "real world issues" that were overcome in scaling a system that currently processes millions of articles per week. Finally, we will discuss the existing Solr and Python landscape, and how we at Parse.ly aim to help the Solr community with the open source release of high-quality, Pythonic components for doing common Solr tasks.