Full text search: Whoosh Vs SOLR

Question

Hi all,

I am working on a Django project, where I need to implement full text search. I have seen SOLR and found some good comments for the same. But as its implemented in Java and would need java enviroment to be installed on the system along with Python. Looking for the python equivalent for SOLR, I have seen Whoosh but I am not sure whether Whoosh is as efficient and strong as SOLR. Or shall I go with SOLR option only or are there any better options than Whoosh and SOLR with python?

Please suggest.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Whoosh is actually very fast for a python-only implementation. That said, it's still at least an order of magnitude slower. Depending on the amount of data you need to index and search and the requirements on the maximum allowable latency and concurrent searches, it may not be an option.

SOLR is a bit of a complicated beast, but it's by far the most comprehensive search solution. Mix it with solrpy for stunning results. Yes, you will need java hosting.

You might also want to check out the python bindings for xapian. Xapian is very very fast, but less of a complete solution than SOLR. They are GPL licensed though, so that may/may not be viable for you.

Answer 2

I have used Lucene and Lucene extensions like SOLR and Nutch, and I found out that lucene pretty much satisfies what I need. I've only tried Whoosh once but chose Lucene because 1) I am using Java 2) I had trouble making UTF-8 work with Whoosh (not sure if it works out of the box now). In Lucene, I had no trouble working with Chinese characters.

If you're using Python as your Programming Language and Whoosh satisfies your needs then I'd suggest you use it over Java alternatives for better integration, avoid external dependencies, faster customization if you need to code additional functionalities.

UPDATE: If you're interested in using Lucene, it has a Python wrapper: See http://lucene.apache.org/pylucene/