Best search option for a heroku-hosted Rails app?

Question

I've been working on a new project lately where a fantastic search engine is crucial. It's a rails3 app hosted on heroku and I'm looking into possible solutions(a rubygem would be ideal) which offer a easy way to have powerful full-text search.

Right now, I'm using acts_as_tsearch which leverages PostgreSQL and performs a basic MATCH query. Though, it's not really pulling back good results(for example, if I search for "create a project" and "how do i create a project" exists as a query, it doesn't find it).

Can anyone share their experiences with full text search, anyone tried out Solr ?

Answer 1

IndexTank is your best bet. They were recently added as a Heroku add-on.

We recently tried to just run our own search for our Heroku app and it's just not worth it because you have to worry about stability and scaling of that search box. It's better to go with a provider, like IndexTank.

IndexTank also powers Reddit and Wordpress.com, so can bet it'll be reliable.

Answer 2

SOLR works very nicely -- it's a bit pricey to get starts ($20 a month), but it just works, and works well.

They recently added the ability to ask the user "Did you mean to search for [correct spelling]".

You can easily cross-model search (search for Users and Cars and Dealerships).