Recommended search library?

Rails
1

I’m at a point where I’d like to start adding search capability to my
app, so I thought I’d ask:

Anyone have any recommendations for a good Rails search
library/plugin/etc? There seem to be quite a few different ones out
there, but I don’t have much context on any of them.

What is the difference between using Ferret, or a SearchGenerator,
SimpleSearch, etc?

Thanks!
Jeff

2

im not sure what my application needs. basically all of my data, so
called food recipes, are going to be stored in a table. if a user types
in “bbq ribs” in the search box that is specified to search for title
field in the recipe table, will it match titles that are named “island
bbq style ribs”, “grilled ribs”, or does the search engines need exact
title match to return a query? does the search engine return the titles
that match both words first? etc…

maybe i should go with ferret since its most widely use?

any help would be greatly appreciated. thank you.

3

I have had the best results with using acts_as_ferret.

John

4

Hi,

I prefer acts_as_searchable. It user HyperEstraier (it seems to have
better utf support then ferret).

It is a bit more complex to setup HyperEstraier, but I think it is
worth it.

http://poocs.net/2006/4/6/introducing-acts-as-searchable

Hamza

5

Hi,

bbqTree schrieb:

maybe i should go with ferret since its most widely use?

Yes: http://projects.jkraemer.net/acts_as_ferret

Lutz

6

On 10/10/06, hamza khan-cheema [email protected] wrote:

Hi,

I prefer acts_as_searchable. It user HyperEstraier (it seems to have
better utf support then ferret).

Hi Hamza,

In what way is the utf8 support better? Just curious.

Dave

7

Dave,

Well I guess that statement does not have much weight behind it. I
should not have said that, it is just my impression :slight_smile:

I can just base that on past experiance. If you go to the
HyperEstraier demonstration site, in Japanese
(Hyper Estraier: a full-text search system for communities) You
will see that it handles utf-8 very nicely.

When I was working on www.chinadialogue.net , I first started using
Ferret, but found that I was having difficulities indexing the content.
So I tried using HyperEstaier, and it just seemed to make the index.

Looking back, it might not have anything to do with utf-8, just my lack
of knowledge.

Hamza

8

On 10/10/06, hamza khan-cheema [email protected] wrote:

When I was working on www.chinadialogue.net , I first started using
Ferret, but found that I was having difficulities indexing the content.
So I tried using HyperEstaier, and it just seemed to make the index.

Looking back, it might not have anything to do with utf-8, just my lack
of knowledge.

Maybe not. Ferret has come a long way in the last few months. UTF-8
data should be fine. The only problem you might run into now is if you
use mixed data encodings like UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 together but I
imagine this wouldn’t be good in HyperEstraier either. Maybe I’m wrong
and it does detecting the data encoding somehow.

Cheers,
Dave