#2: Sorry i consider this moot: - the docs for tsearch are dense, not terribly friendly, and acts_as_tsearch appears to be under documented and possibly not ma

#2: Sorry i consider this moot: - the docs for tsearch are dense, not terribly friendly, and acts_as_tsearch appears to be under documented and possibly not maintained/updated. So if tsearch has any deal winners over sphinx and solr (for me, key ones would be custom tokenizers/stemmers, UTF-8, column weights, indexing short words and acronyms, faceted search, indexing instance methods and has_many child records along with what's in parent record) they're not readily apparent. Granted i only tried to understand tsearch for ~20 minutes) and a_a_tsearch did well in benchmarks, see comments: (teh tsearch count for "god" in index by book does indicate a possibly serious problem) http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2008/03/17/rails-search-benchmarks/ http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2008/03/17/rails-search-... - The four leading search plugins: acts_as_[ferret, solr],ultrasphinx , thinkng sphinx work equally well with MySQL, and postgres, as far as i know. They're all pretty painless installs, if not terribly fast to build indexes, in the case of ferret and solr