Hi everybody!
I am proud to present you a small project I have been working on for a while: Picolena, a lightweight ferret-powered search engine written in Rails. ( http://picolena.devjavu.com/ )
I wrote it for our company's intranet so that we could apply full text search on our shared folders. It works pretty well, is very fast thanks to Ferret, and I suppose it could be useful to other people.
Here are some queries example: http://193.197.204.23:4000/documents/einstein http://193.197.204.23:4000/documents/LIKE%20ferret http://193.197.204.23:4000/documents/filetype:pdf
SVN repository is available there: http://svn.devjavu.com/picolena/trunk
and the installation process is described there: http://picolena.devjavu.com/
I only tried it on Ubuntu 7.04/7.10, but I guess it wouldn't be too much trouble to install it on other *nix. Installing it on Windows platforms could be harder though.
It supports full text search for PDF, OpenOffice.org, MS Office documents and some other formats. Adding new converters should be easy thanks to a small DSL I wrote.
I don't pretend to write good Ruby/Rails code, but at least this
application gets the job done, so I'm releasing Picolena under an MIT
License:
Maybe others could find it useful, give some feedback and help make
this app getting better. Sure enough, there's room for improvement 
Enjoy,
Eric
