# Searching help

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/searching-help/180110>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 11, 2009, 6:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/searching-help/180110 "2009-12-11T18:51:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![beev](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/b38774/32.png) [@beev](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/beev)\
**Post date:** [December 11, 2009, 6:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/searching-help/180110/1 "2009-12-11T18:51:17Z")

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I am reaching out to get some help/ideas about our current search  
implementation.

We are currently using Ferret as our search engine and its not keeping  
up with our needs… we are quite needy ;). We have about 5m+ documents  
that total around 8-10gb of data and indexing can take up to a half a  
day which is obviously not where we want to be.

I’ve been looking into Solr and Sphinx and I’m am wondering if anyone  
would have any thoughts to which would be suite our needs. What are the  
pros/cons of each?

Another search related question I have is how would one go about  
classifying documents based on content? Does Solr or Sphinx have this  
capability? Even better question is how do I go about displaying  
categories (and their counts) for a specific search term? For example if  
I search for ‘hat’ I want a category browse like the following:

# Accessories (30,940)

# Children (24,090)

# Crochet (19,884)

…

How is this done? FYI for a live example of what I want, check out:

> **[Handmade - Etsy](https://www.etsy.com/c/handmade?search_type=handmade&search_query=hat)**
>
> Shop products from Etsy sellers. Free shipping may be available!

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks