# Text search engine?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 21, 2005, 1:18pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178 "2005-12-21T13:18:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [December 21, 2005, 1:18pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178/1 "2005-12-21T13:18:23Z")

</div>

Hi there,

What are you using for text search engine in your rails applications ?  
I have been using simple search for simple applications, but then I  
need to search text in model instances inside collections such as  
user.documents and the like. I believe that simple search does not  
support any sort of ranged queries, and sql like might be overkill for  
tables with lots of records.

Bests,

Sergi  
Borràs

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [December 21, 2005, 1:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178/2 "2005-12-21T13:24:25Z")

</div>

Hi Sergi,

On 21.12.2005, at 14.17, sergi borras wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> What are you using for text search engine in your rails applications ?  
> I have been using simple search for simple applications, but then I  
> need to search text in model instances inside collections such as  
> user.documents and the like. I believe that simple search does not  
> support any sort of ranged queries, and sql like might be overkill for  
> tables with lots of records.

Why not give Ferret [1] a whirl?

//jarkko

[1] [http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac](http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [December 21, 2005, 1:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178/3 "2005-12-21T13:45:29Z")

</div>

ferret is just `awesom-o`

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [December 21, 2005, 2:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178/4 "2005-12-21T14:00:32Z")

</div>

You can try Ferret and you can try my ActiveSearch.  
I am integrating Ferret but before I resolve some issues (which I  
don’t have time for right now, including a Unicode-aware tokenizer)  
it’s nowhere near complete.

[http://julik.nl/code/active-search/](http://julik.nl/code/active-search/)

On 21-dec-2005, at 13:44, Onur T. wrote:

> ferret is just `awesom-o`

–  
Julian ‘Julik’ Tarkhanov  
me at julik.nl

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [December 21, 2005, 2:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178/5 "2005-12-21T14:09:34Z")

</div>

Hi.

We are using Ferret in agora project [http://stage.budapestagora.com/](http://stage.budapestagora.com/) and  
we  
are happy with it.

Except probably that ferret sometimes is painfully slow. But I believe  
that  
David will make miracle with cferret project and ferret will be  
appallingly  
fast.

Anyway I suggest you to check Ferret project  
[http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac/wiki](http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac/wiki). It is the best what we have  
now.

On 12/21/05, Onur T. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> > > 
> > 
> > //jarkko
> 
> –  
> anatol ([http://pomozov.info](http://pomozov.info))

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [December 21, 2005, 5:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/text-search-engine/74178/6 "2005-12-21T17:06:13Z")

</div>

While ferret is cool, very cool… I’m not using it… And as soon as it’s  
c-bindings start to deliver some speed i’ll surely try using it.

In the mean time, and to my own surprise, using rjb  
([http://arton.no-ip.info/collabo/backyard/?RubyJavaBridge](http://arton.no-ip.info/collabo/backyard/?RubyJavaBridge)) to interact  
with lucene works like a charm. (To get this bitch working on windows,  
you have to hack a bit to disable it’s build-in iconv functionality.  
Also only use java Objects and other simple types, that’s of type Object  
or string, int, etc., in the java function you proxy you can cast them  
to what they really are, otherwise the interface doesn’t seem to work)