Rails Search Integration

I have been looking at integrating a search engine into rails, and I am considering both Sphinx with the Thinkink Sphinx plugin, or possibly Solr with the acts as solr plugin.

My question is which one works best in general? As far a开发者_JAVA技巧s I can see sphinx seems to be the option most people go with to get a basic search up and running.

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Sphinx is simple to deploy and really great in simple case. With Sphinx there are no really different request system. You are a little limit. But it's a great tool and works fine.

Solr is a really big application. But can be too big for small system. Solr has a great query system. So you can made more complicated query with it.

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Having worked with both, my take is "sphinx if you want to get set up quickly and have less load (Java) on your server (it is a C app)", "solr if search is a critical part of your application and delivering search results quality is very important." (and you're ok with having the JRE on your server) For a website I'd probably use Google custom search engine with custom css, for a freelance project (short term) I'd probably use Sphinx, for a company as an employee on a web application where users needed to find archived information by searching, I'd use solr." Another point might be where you host the application. Engine Yard offers Sphinx I believe.

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I would recommend the thinking_sphinx plugin. The acts_as_solr is very out of date and not very robust. While SOLR may give better search result matching it is also a bear to setup and maintain. I have written some very complex and quality search algorithms in thinking_sphinx. You can do quite a bit with it. It is also extremely easy to setup.