Going beyond LIKE in searches

Question

Kind of similar to how the "Related Questions" search works here when posting questions: What open source systems exists out there that lets your searches go beyond SQL based LIKE matches? I want to be able to query "he said it" and get results that includes "she said it" (with "said it" being the key, not the semantical meaning of he/she). Again, similar to how my title, "Going beyond LIKE in searches", lists amongst others the question "Going beyond the iframe".

FYI: This is for a Ruby on Rails app. No particular DB engine is required, other than it free/open source (e.g no Oracle, MsSql and so on).

UPDATE: I wish stackoverflow.com would let me accept multiple answers! Kind of hard to pick one for a namedropping question such as this. You have my upvotes, though ; )

Answer 1

The big OS full text search engine I can think of is Lucene.

I think its search capabilities will do what you want.

Answer 2

Check out Sphinx Search.

This is open source software (GPL v2). It includes an API for Ruby on Rails.

There's at least one other API for Ruby on Rails called Riddle (get it? Riddle of the Sphinx? :-).