The ruby folks have Ferret. Someone know of any similar initiative for Python? We're using PyLucene at current, but I'd like to investigate moving to pure Python searching.
lupy was a lucene port to pure python.The lupy people suggest that you use PyLucene. Sorry. Maybe you can use the Java sources in combination with Jython.
For some applications pure Python is overrated. Take a look at Xapian.
After weeks of searching for this, I found a nice Python solution: repoze.catalog. It's not strictly Python-only because it uses ZODB for storage, but it seems a better dependency to me than something like SOLR.
+1 to the Xapian and Pyndexter answers.
Ferret is actually written in C with Ruby bindings on top. A pure Ruby search engine would be even slower than a pure Python one. I would love to see "someone else" write a Cython/Pyrex layer for Python interface to Ferret, but won't do it myself because why bother when there are Python bindings for Xapian.
Whoosh is a new project which is similar to lucene, but is pure python.
For non-pure Python, Sphinx Search with Python API work is the fastest. From the bench marks from multiple blogs . Sphinxsearch is way faster than , way less memory usage then Lucence and it is in C.
I am developing a multi-document searchengine base on it, using python and web2py as framework
web2py.com sphinxsearch.com