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There are several plugin options for building a search engine into your Ruby on Rails application. Which of these is the best?
There are several plugin options for building a search engine into your Ruby on Rails application. Which of these is the best?
Thinking Sphinx has more concise syntax to define which fields and which models are indexed.
Both UltraSphinx and Thinking Sphinx (recently) have ultra-cool feature which takes into account geographical proximity of objects.
UltraSphinx has annoying problems with how it loads models (it does not load entire Rails stack, so you could get strange and hard to diagnose errors, which are handled by adding explicit require statements).
We use Thinking Sphinx on new projects, and UltraSphinx on projects which use geo content.
I recommend Thinking Sphinx. It is the fastest option in my opinion.
I'm using a different option which was worked out amazingly well. I'm using jruby and talking to lucene directly.
I've used acts_as_solr in the past and ran into some issues. mainly it makes a synchronous call for each AR save. This isn't too bad, but in my situation a save sometimes caused many synchronous calls to solr and would occasionally take longer than mongrel would allow and I'd get a mongrel timeout exception (or something like that)