Rails Search Plugins & Solutions

Question

I'm looking to add a search box on my Rails site and was wondering if you could recommend me solutions for conducting general searches across designated columns. I've noticed the acts_as_ferret plugin which seems good, but I'm also looking for other opinions. Any leads or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for looking!

Answer 1

I have been using ferret for 2 years on an internal application without any problems. The performance and stability have been OK but my user base and data size are not very large. Probably 300-400 searches a day on an index size of around 600MB.

Answer 2

Ferret is buggy, I'm using Sphinx (Thinking Sphinx plugin). Solr is based on Java. Sphinx is fast, it's support delta indexing and it integrates with will_paginte.

Answer 3

I haven't heard good things about Ferret so I used Solr (which is based on Apache's Lucene). It worked pretty well but I had problems with certain characters in the input causing problems and they were slow to release updates with all the patches incorporated. My plan is to switch an existing project I have to Sphinx to see if it is indeed as good as some have said.

Answer 4

Sphinx is very good. Check out this excellent Railscast on the Thinking Sphinx plugin.

Answer 5

I've used Ferret in the past with few problems, although I've heard Sphinx is better.