How to use Apache Solr Search Integration as a faceted browsing system

I don't fully understand your issue, but maybe this helps...

There is a proposed patch to do it out of the box: see #457826: On empty search, show enabled filters to start a search which has attached screenshots.

You could, of course, create a static page and/or blocks with just links to each category you want to start browsing.

or take a swing with http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr_views.

the code for Drupal.org is in the project module (see project_solr), though it needs to be updated a little for the newest version of the apachesolr module http://drupal.org/project/project

@Ocyrhoé : Hmm, this is a possible way to do it:

1) Apply the patch from this issue: #457826: On empty search, show enabled filters to start a search
2) Empty your site's cache
3) Visit your site's search/apachesolr_search page. You should now see a listing of all your enabled filters.
4) Use that page as your starting page, or if you want to put it elsewhere, you could copy-paste and edit the resulting HTML into another page.

Closing this one out for now.

use taxonomy for categorizing and use the setting "use solr for taxonomy" (admin settings solr).