[Rails] Full-text search

[Scott Barron]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 02:24:58PM +0200, Jarkko Laine wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm interesting in ways people have incorporated any kinds of full-text 
> search engines like OpenFTS (http://openfts.sourceforge.net/) with 
> rails. Or do you use the built-in MySQL engine?
> 
> If the latter, how does it perform? I've heard it can be painfully 
> slow. Judging by the MySQL docs, one full-text index can only span one 
> db table which doesn't sound really helpful for an app that has many 
> different kinds of content.
> 
> Any pointers? Ideas? Opinions?
> 

I mentioned this to you on IRC, but I thought I'd post it up here real
quick.  I've used the tsearch2 module for PostgreSQL in two of my
projects with some degree of success.  I do have to break down into
find_by_sql when I want to utilize it, so I haven't done any real
integration with AR so to speak, but that method does work for what I
need it to do.  It performs fine enough, I don't have any speed problems
without.

However, I would be interested in hearing about a more generic solution
that can work the same on boty MySQL and PostgreSQL.  I'd like to add
full text search to both of my "public" rails projects but I don't want
to have to hack around different methods for pg vs mysql.  I haven't
checked out OTFS, but I'll give that a look over.  Any other ideas?
Just usign LIKE is OK, but, at least with tsearch2, you can get sexier
with rankings and relativeness, etc.  I want sexification.

-Scott