# Ferret vs Lucene 2.3.1

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-vs-lucene-2-3-1/131933>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [March 14, 2008, 3:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-vs-lucene-2-3-1/131933 "2008-03-14T15:26:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2008, 3:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-vs-lucene-2-3-1/131933/1 "2008-03-14T15:26:02Z")

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Has anyone run any comparisons between Ferret and Lucene 2.3.1?

I saw many comparisons between older versions claiming Ferret is 2x  
faster but these are outdated and I cannot use these metrics to make  
any sort of decisions. Lucene is claiming to have made major speed  
improvements in version 2.3. While my company is looking into Lucene  
2.3.1, I am trying to see if Ferret being faster and quite possibly  
better than Lucene is a better direction (also I’d get a chance to  
plug Ruby into the system :))

If anyone has done any metrics recently can you please post the  
results you have, also please indicate how much time was spent  
optimizing Lucene and Ferret, or only minimal optimizations were  
attempted.

Thanks in advance to anyone who posts.

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [March 15, 2008, 12:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ferret-vs-lucene-2-3-1/131933/2 "2008-03-15T00:25:42Z")

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On Mar 14, 2008, at 7:24 AM, removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote:

> If anyone has done any metrics recently can you please post the  
> results you have, also please indicate how much time was spent  
> optimizing Lucene and Ferret, or only minimal optimizations were  
> attempted.
> 
> Thanks in advance to anyone who posts.

Which one gives you higher quality search results? Ferret is supposed  
to be a port of Lucene, but Lucene _is_ Lucene. Better? Worse? The  
same? I don’t know, but I’d rather be a bit slower and get more  
relevant matches and if the result set is different that would be my  
main decision point. I’ve tried acts\_as\_ferret and acts\_as\_solr in  
Rails apps and for the simple case where the data is pretty different,  
one record to the next, the results are pretty good. It’s where you  
have clustering that a problem can occur. (Think about indexing topics  
about Ruby that contain words similar to “active”.)

HTH