That's good advice. I'll admit the scaling aspects of Ferret, and Rails at this point, scare me quite a bit. My goal right now is to continue to expand my index

That's good advice. I'll admit the scaling aspects of Ferret, and Rails at this point, scare me quite a bit. My goal right now is to continue to expand my index and learn what's working and what's not. As was mentioned in another comment I'm looking into other, more long term, indexing solutions (possibly SOLR), so hopefully that will help in the relevancy area. I'm also working on an in-house ranking algo to better sort results. I appreciate your feedback.