I'm looking to add a search box on my Rails site and was wondering if you could recommend me solutions for conducting general searches across designated columns. I've noticed the acts_as_ferret plugin which seems good, but I'm also looking for other opinions. Any leads or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for looking!
I've used Ferret in the past with few problems, although I've heard Sphinx is better.
Sphinx is very good. Check out this excellent Railscast on the Thinking Sphinx plugin.
I haven't heard good things about Ferret so I used Solr (which is based on Apache's Lucene). It worked pretty well but I had problems with certain characters in the input causing problems and they were slow to release updates with all the patches incorporated. My plan is to switch an existing project I have to Sphinx to see if it is indeed as good as some have said.
Ferret is buggy, I'm using Sphinx (Thinking Sphinx plugin). Solr is based on Java. Sphinx is fast, it's support delta indexing and it integrates with will_paginte.