For very small datasets, Whoosh is fine. For anything larger than 'site search' on a website that has no UGC, you're much better off with SOLR (or ES, Xapian or

For very small datasets, Whoosh is fine. For anything larger than 'site search' on a website that has no UGC, you're much better off with SOLR (or ES, Xapian or Sphinx - whatever your poison). When document counts get into the hundreds you see orders of magnitude faster queries with SOLR (etc), not to mention much more sophisticated querying options.