# Picolena, a lightweight ferret-powered search engine written in Rails

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/picolena-a-lightweight-ferret-powered-search-engine-written-in-rails/130030>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [February 24, 2008, 5:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/picolena-a-lightweight-ferret-powered-search-engine-written-in-rails/130030 "2008-02-24T17:13:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**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:** [February 24, 2008, 5:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/picolena-a-lightweight-ferret-powered-search-engine-written-in-rails/130030/1 "2008-02-24T17:13:53Z")

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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/](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/einstein)  
[http://193.197.204.23:4000/documents/LIKE%20ferret](http://193.197.204.23:4000/documents/LIKE%20ferret)  
[http://193.197.204.23:4000/documents/filetype:pdf](http://193.197.204.23:4000/documents/filetype:pdf)

SVN repository is available there:  
[http://svn.devjavu.com/picolena/trunk](http://svn.devjavu.com/picolena/trunk)

and the installation process is described there:  
[http://picolena.devjavu.com/](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](http://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