4 ms·

Full Text Searching with Solr and Sunspot

25 points by zmoazeni 16y ago

jhancock 16y ago
Good intro. I've been using sunspot for a year on a ruby webapp (merb, I found the sunspot lib nicely framework agnostic). It took a few hours to setup and get my content indexed. Its been running in production for a year with zero maintenance.
- gtani 16y ago
  Solr/lucene (they're on a joint release schedule now) give you more config options than any other fulltext engine. Some alternatives are sphinx (blazing fast indexing), IndexTank, and Riak Search (I haven't tried the last 2).
  - zmoazeni 16y ago
    If anyone has any good resources on Riak search, please share them. I keep hearing good things about Riak and haven't dived in yet.
- zmoazeni 16y ago
  Thanks jhancock - I'm planning on writing a post talking about sunspot without sunspot_rails. I tried to make this post concise. It's cool to hear you have already had success with it.
getsat 16y ago
Check out Sphinx and the amazing ThinkingSphinx gem. Having used both extensively, I greatly prefer Sphinx over Solr. http://sphinxsearch.com/ http://sphinxsearch.com/ http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/ http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/ CollectiveIdea also maintains a good fork of delayed_job for those who are interested in that.
- riffraff 16y ago
  care to share the reasons of this preference?
  - thibaut_barrere 16y ago
    I use both; I prefer sunspot if I need to index arbitrary ruby methods results (eg: methods that result in multiple queries/data clean-up) or if I work with MongoDB. I prefer sphinx when I need a more lightweight setup on RAM, or need an easy geosearch, or work with mysql. EDIT: - sunspot allows for per-request weighting in the search (see http://blog.logeek.fr/2011/3/4/hackerbooks-books-stackoverflow-hackernews http://blog.logeek.fr/2011/3/4/hackerbooks-books-stackoverfl... for an example), not sure if it's possible with ts
    - getsat 16y ago
      That flexible weighting looks nice! Thanks for the link. Yeah, if I ever use a NoSQL datastore on a project I'll likely end up using Solr. Faster than writing a new Sphinx interface for it.
  - getsat 16y ago
    Easier to setup, doesn't depend on Java, insanely fast indexing, delta indexes. Basically, it's just a fast little search server that handles everything I've thrown at it. That, and I had a terrible experience using acts_as_solr back in the day...
- zmoazeni 16y ago
  Thanks getsat for the shout out. Our guys have put in a lot of work adding features and keeping delayed_job up to snuff. I do have to disagree with you on ThinkingSphinx. I have used both, and I gel much better with Solr. Don't get me wrong, the guy(s) who did ThinkingSphinx have worked hard. I just don't like the moving pieces of ThinkingSphinx: continuous rake tasks, the fact that it sits directly on top of the database, extra re-deployment steps when using capistrano. I prefer having the search server sitting apart.

25 points by zmoazeni 16y ago

Good intro. I've been using sunspot for a year on a ruby webapp (merb, I found the sunspot lib nicely framework agnostic). It took a few hours to setup and get my content indexed. Its been running in production for a year with zero maintenance.

gtani 16y ago
Solr/lucene (they're on a joint release schedule now) give you more config options than any other fulltext engine. Some alternatives are sphinx (blazing fast indexing), IndexTank, and Riak Search (I haven't tried the last 2).
- zmoazeni 16y ago
  If anyone has any good resources on Riak search, please share them. I keep hearing good things about Riak and haven't dived in yet.
zmoazeni 16y ago
Thanks jhancock - I'm planning on writing a post talking about sunspot without sunspot_rails. I tried to make this post concise. It's cool to hear you have already had success with it.

getsat 16y ago

Check out Sphinx and the amazing ThinkingSphinx gem. Having used both extensively, I greatly prefer Sphinx over Solr. http://sphinxsearch.com/ http://sphinxsearch.com/ http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/ http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/ CollectiveIdea also maintains a good fork of delayed_job for those who are interested in that.

riffraff 16y ago
care to share the reasons of this preference?
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago
  I use both; I prefer sunspot if I need to index arbitrary ruby methods results (eg: methods that result in multiple queries/data clean-up) or if I work with MongoDB. I prefer sphinx when I need a more lightweight setup on RAM, or need an easy geosearch, or work with mysql. EDIT: - sunspot allows for per-request weighting in the search (see http://blog.logeek.fr/2011/3/4/hackerbooks-books-stackoverflow-hackernews http://blog.logeek.fr/2011/3/4/hackerbooks-books-stackoverfl... for an example), not sure if it's possible with ts
  - getsat 16y ago
    That flexible weighting looks nice! Thanks for the link. Yeah, if I ever use a NoSQL datastore on a project I'll likely end up using Solr. Faster than writing a new Sphinx interface for it.
- getsat 16y ago
  Easier to setup, doesn't depend on Java, insanely fast indexing, delta indexes. Basically, it's just a fast little search server that handles everything I've thrown at it. That, and I had a terrible experience using acts_as_solr back in the day...
zmoazeni 16y ago
Thanks getsat for the shout out. Our guys have put in a lot of work adding features and keeping delayed_job up to snuff. I do have to disagree with you on ThinkingSphinx. I have used both, and I gel much better with Solr. Don't get me wrong, the guy(s) who did ThinkingSphinx have worked hard. I just don't like the moving pieces of ThinkingSphinx: continuous rake tasks, the fact that it sits directly on top of the database, extra re-deployment steps when using capistrano. I prefer having the search server sitting apart.