I've been working on a new project lately where a fantastic search engine is crucial. It's a rails3 app hosted on heroku and I'm looking into possible solutions(a rubygem would be ideal) which offer a easy way to have powerful full-text search.
Right now, I'm using acts_as_tsearch which leverages PostgreSQL and performs a basic MATCH query. Though, it's not really pulling back good results(for example, if I search for "create a project" and "how do i create a project" exists as a query, it doesn't find it).
Can anyone share their experiences with full text search, anyone tried out Solr ?
IndexTank is your best bet. They were recently added as a Heroku add-on.
We recently tried to just run our own search for our Heroku app and it's just not worth it because you have to worry about stability and scaling of that search box. It's better to go with a provider, like IndexTank.
IndexTank also powers Reddit and Wordpress.com, so can bet it'll be reliable.
SOLR works very nicely -- it's a bit pricey to get starts ($20 a month), but it just works, and works well.
They recently added the ability to ask the user "Did you mean to search for [correct spelling]".
You can easily cross-model search (search for Users and Cars and Dealerships).
Heroku offers addons which you can easily add to your application. You should take a look at Solr and IndexTank.
There's a free solution in the Texticle gem. It uses PostgreSQL's (> 8.3) full text index support and creates a search method on your models. If you create indexes, the speed is very good (for a free solution).
Hope that helps!
Related
We currently have a staging website, which has an IP address like xx.xx.xxx.xxx and we would like to have integrated and tested GCS on it before pushing it live. Is it possible?
Otherwise, is there any alternative to GCS to add a search bar in a Jekyll blog without using plugin?
Thanks!
PART I: Google
Google custom search cannot index an application that isn't available to the internet.
No, that's not entirely true. You can arrange something with Google (in theory, never done it) but it doesn't look easy. Or cheap.
You could set up a custom search for an unrelated site and embed those results in your local page, if you want to test out CSS prior to launch.
Remember, Google Custom Search also comes with ads, unless you pay. And the results tend to look like they came from Google.
PART II: Alternatives
I've looked into this extensively and I haven't come up with a good answer. Here are some not-so-good answers:
1) Tapir Search. This actually worked pretty well, but appears to have died. They do have recent twitter activity, however, so maybe worth checking back in a bit. twitter. It's basically a (free) front end for an elasticsearch server. I think. Neat service, obviously not super-dependable.
2) Go javascript. Lunr for example. There are many, many similar solutions available. Sadly, they are client-side and doing a full-text search on even a smallish blog type site can be very slow. Works okay if you limit the search to titles, but then...you're only searching titles.
3) Build a search engine server. Maybe some breed of Lucene. Upside: very robust search while keeping the snappy response of a flat HTML site. Downside: building and maintaining a search engine server is difficult, expensive and probably overkill.
4) Hosted search engine. Algolia for example. They're basically doing 3) for you. Relatively expensive (~$50/month) but well worth the cost, because, seriously, search engine servers are finicky and prone to explosions. I've never gone this route with Jekyll because I've never had a Jekyll project I was quite that serious about, but I did consider it.
If anyone has anything to add, I'd love to hear it. This question has been irritating me for a while.
I've added sunspot gem in my application and tried to send it to production in heroku, but I'm trying to reindex my database, however, I'm getting an error. I did some more digging and I think I have to add websolr as an add-on? This costs $20/month. Is this the only option?
THanks
Founder of Websolr + Bonsai here (Heroku addons for Solr and Elasticsearch).
Rich's answer is pretty solid, with the exception of the SQL LIKE operator, which I do not recommend. The performance does not scale, and you're either going to sink in a lot more time than you might expect in order to eke out baseline search functionality. End result: a lot of time spent, and unhappy users.
Postgres full text search is a reasonable alternative, though the term analysis and result ranking will be lacking compared to Solr/Elasticsearch as your search traffic starts to grow in production.
You might also consider our sister service, Bonsai, which does offer a free Starter plan. It uses Elasticsearch, which means you'd want to use the official Ruby bindings for Elasticsearch rather than Sunspot.
Lastly, if you already have a production app on Heroku, you are welcome to create more than one index in your account, and share those indexes with your staging/qa and other apps.
I've done some more research and found out that there are other options if you don't want to take the websolr path. These other answers are good for some insights, but doesn't give an alternative to what can be used.
For some that's still looking, I suggest taking a look at Elastic Search
Rails Cast has a good tutorial on this as well.
And to use it with heroku, look into Bonsai which gives users a free option.
Hopefully this answer will help those that are also seeking other options than using sunspot gem with solr
Solr on Heroku uses their own add-on, which starts at $20pm:
Although I don't know why it costs up front, and doesn't have a "trial" option like many of the other Heroku Add-ons, there are certain ways around it
Full Text Search
Full text search is what you're performing, and Solr is a tool to make the process much more efficient. Despite being quite DB-expensive, you can use full text searching with Heroku, depending on your DB:
MYSQL
To perform full-text searching on MYSQL, you can simply use the "LIKE" operator with %variable% as your search phrase, like this:
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `name` LIKE `%benjamin%`
This basically finds all the records where the name column contains "benjamin" somewhere inside it. This is quite slow
POSTGRESQL
PostgreSQL offers more power in its full text searching, but is nonetheless still quite slow & expensive. You can read more about it here, but with rails, you can use a bunch of gems which do the task for you
We recently used a gem called textacular here: http://firststop.herokuapp.com
Here is the code we used for it:
#Search
def self.search(search)
basic_search(name: search, description: search)
end
Further Reading
You can see how full text searching works here: Any reason not use PostgreSQL's built-in full text search on Heroku?
I would recommend if you're just getting the foundations established for your app. Afterwards, you can upgrade to a more dedicated solution in the form of Solr et al
Here are
If you want to use the Heroku platform it starts for free, but you have to pay for almost every add-on, extra workers, extra storage, search engine, background tasks, you name it.
For $20/month you could also get a decent VPS, but you would have to install and manage that server by yourself.
As for sunspot/solr on Heroku, I don't think you can do that for free.
I'm building my first rails app and I'm trying to build the search page on an ecommerce type site. The idea is the model pulls all the data from the database according to the filter that is checked or selected on the view such as (category, sub-category, price, date, etc.)
I've watched railscasts on elasticsearch, solar, etc. They seem like they'd each work in this scenario but are they overkill? I'm just not sure what is the quickest and most scalable way to set up this search. I've read a little about the has_scope gem which seems like it would be one way but I can't find a good tutorial or documentation on has_scope. Can someone point me in the right direction for creating this search page? Should I build it out with has_scope, solar, or elasticsearch?
Thanks
In my own experience solr is the best search technology I've come across. It provides a feature called faceting which is what you are describing. You can read about it on their wiki here: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrFacetingOverview
The best solr gem I've come across is sunspot. It has a very easy to use DSL for interfacing with solr from a Rails app and hooks in to active record very easily. Take a look at their github project page. I think that will answer your question.
I am about to launch a beta site, and heroku looks like a great option. The only think that is getting me down is that the only search option is $20/mth for the Websolr add-on.
I am sure that Websolr is great, but at this very early point in this project, I rather not light up that expense.
Are there any free search options to couple with heroku's Blossom (free) plan.
I feel like such a cheapskate!
This post seems to have good options:
Leveraging the full text search of postgrSQL:
http://tenderlovemaking.com/2009/10/17/full-text-search-on-heroku.html
Also explains the options of Ferret and Solr.
IndexTank has a heroku addon you can use for free.
It has some advantages over websolr, like realtimeness, fast (all in ram), and a very flexible scoring system that doesn't require to reindex (allows for very easy a/b testing).
My gem pg_search does full-text search against PostgreSQL, and works directly on Heroku.
Check it out and let me know if it works for you!
acts_as_tsearch works great. No configuration needed if you have postgresql > 8.3. Have to experiment with multiple tables though. Will use it on heroku till i can afford the WebSolr Add-on. I found it a better option compared to the texticle method as explained in the article link above (tendermaking).
acts_as_tsearch: http://github.com/pka/acts_as_tsearch
No, I was looking for that too a week ago, and didn't find anything...
And I don't think there is any work in progress on another add-ons like this as they already have one, so they won't put another that is free... :/
Anyway, heroku is amazing, so try to make it work with code or just spend $20 :)
acts_as_ferret won't work as Heroku cleans up the /tmp directory regularly. Even i am in need of a full-text solution. Thinking of trying out the acts_as_tsearch plugin.
Looks like IndexTank was purchased by LinkedIn and will be discontinuing support (although some portions might be open-sourced in the future). See this post for more info: https://indextank.com/documentation/faq2
If you're using Postgres for your Rails app then take a look at this free way to do full text search:
Part 1 and
Part 2
This uses the pg_search gem to allow you to use PostgreSQL's pg_search_scopes feature and have full text search without any other dependencies.
I need to add full web search to my site. I need something like Google Custom Search but with no ads and it has to be free. Any recommendation of a web service or open source project that can index my site and allow me to search it will be helpful.
My site is made in ruby on rails, if that helps.
I'll make this question community-wiki so you can edit my bad English. I think many people can benefit from this question.
Check out Lucene. It's an open source search engine that will certainly be a fun learning experience to implement on your own site. It was originally designed by the Excite folks, I do believe.
Ferret is the Ruby port of Lucene. Check out the acts_as_ferret plugin.
Depends what you mean by full web search really. If you want to search the whole web then the answers above wont help you much as they are really for indexing and searching the content of your site. I would suggest using the Google ajax search (just a 'powered by google' needed, no ads) or Boss from yahoo (might require ads not sure).
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
People are going to acts_as_solr and thinking sphinx in the blogs i read:
http://acts-as-solr.rubyforge.org/
http://ts.freelancing-gods.com/
I've aslo been looking at tsearch in postgres, it looks very capable:
http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/
What do you mean by "full web search"?
The are good answers available for full-text search where a search engine indexes and queries the model objects stored in your database.
If you mean something that indexes and queries your rendered HTML, Nutch is a popular option with a web-crawler, parser, indexer, and query interface.
I recommend acts_as_xapian. It's very easy to implement, it's fast enough, and it's the got the features you'll normally need.