this may over-lap with my recent ferret post, but I wondered if anyone
knew of the best way to add a search engine for rails on your site?
I've tried ferret, which seems a bit ''hit n miss''
Someone has also reccomeded paperclip.
In addition to this, where would I look to find the ability to add a
google contacts search facility? So - anyone can enter their account
and find people on my site who are also on gmail? Face book have this,
but dunno how it's implemented, or where to start looking...
this may over-lap with my recent ferret post, but I wondered if anyone
knew of the best way to add a search engine for rails on your site?
I've tried ferret, which seems a bit ''hit n miss''
They all seem a bit "hit n miss". That's probably because they respond best with large databases and you are probably working with a test database. The three candidates I've used are:
* Sphinx
* Solr
* Ferret
Someone has also reccomeded paperclip.
Paperclip is for adding attachments to existing models "as if" they were just another column in the database. Storage of the attachment can be in your filesystem, or Amazon S3, or pretty much anywhere else in the cloud. You provide the implementation for the "anywhere else" part.
In addition to this, where would I look to find the ability to add a
google contacts search facility? So - anyone can enter their account
and find people on my site who are also on gmail? Face book have this,
but dunno how it's implemented, or where to start looking...
We use Solr for all but one of our applications, using a custom developed plugin (based on thinking sphinx), working like a charm on our databases that need realtime indexing without delta indexes. Ferret corrupted very often, Sphinx has the realtime problem.
Another option might be to look into MongoDB as a database, has some pretty nifty indexing features too. Requires a bit of a different mindset than normal relational databases though and might not be suited for every project.