How to build an interactive search engine web interface using python

Question

I have build a static web interface for searching data from some tables in my PostgreSQL database. The query website consists of a simple textfield for entering the search term, the result website presents the results as a simple html table. The server side code for searching the PostgreSQL database and returning the results is written in python using psycopg2.

Now I would like to add some interactive "Ajax features" to my search engine. When entering the search term I would like to be able to see a list of possible search terms like Google does it. On the results page, I would like to be able to sort the table showing the results.

What would be the easiest/recommended way to implement these features for my search engine web site?

Answer 1

I have not had to build a search outside of Django, but Haystack http://haystacksearch.org/ makes things very easy.

If you don't want to get into Django you could look at Whoosh. http://bitbucket.org/mchaput/whoosh/wiki/Home

Answer 2

Hi, what you call "Ajax features" are technically known as auto-suggest. Unless you want to reinvent the wheel. I would highly recommend indexing your db tables using Apache Solr. It comes with autosuggest, faceted filtering (like on most ecommerce sites) and spell-check. and since it is HTTP based you can hook into Python very easily using its RESTful API.