Adding search to our Rails 3 App

Question

What would be the best way to implement a searchability feature in the site header of our Rails 3 App?

We have users that can follow each other, and we are receiving feedback in large volumes that a search bar would be a highly advantageous addition to our app.

Thanks guys, in advance.

Answer 1

Hi scud bomb, There are couple of good gems in the market for implementing searchability feature.

the most commonly used gems

1. sunspot + solr (https://github.com/outoftime/sunspot)
2. acts_as_indexed (https://github.com/dougal/acts_as_indexed)
3. thinking-sphinx (https://github.com/freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx)

But i would say Sunspot is the best option.Basically sunspot is a ruby library that interacts with the solr search engine for powerful searching.

there is good blog on this topic have a look.

http://www.idyllic-software.com/blog/fulltext-search-with-sunspot/

Answer 2

My favorite is sunspot: http://sunspot.github.com/. The documentation is very clear. There's even a RailsCast for it to help you out: http://railscasts.com/episodes/278-search-with-sunspot.