Text Search for Rails 3 on Heroku - Texticle vs acts_as_tsearch vs acts_as_indexed

Question

I am building a Rails 3 application that will be hosted on Heroku.

To implement full text search, these are the free alternatives that I have come across:

Texticle

acts_as_tsearch

acts_as_indexed

My application is going to be data intensive with a lot of read and writes. Search is also going to be used a lot.

Search is going to be across different models.

Which one will be the best in terms of performance and scaling?

Are there any other free and better alternatives?

Is it better to go for a IndexTank or WebSolr (that Heroku recommends) instead?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Have you tried PgSearch https://github.com/Casecommons/pg_search? Since heroku uses pg, you actually get full text search for free, and PgSearch builds named scopes that take advantage of PostgreSQL’s full text search.

Answer 2

You can use PostgreSQL's built-in full text search, but it's a pain, but there are gems such as pg_search to make it a lot easier, but that one has some serious problems, but I've figured out easy workarounds. See https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NbN0kJMJsSQW2N7ItNMB6VuM_lJok-Xb0epk0anbRIo (slides from my lightning talk titled "Full Text Search on Heroku for FREE") for details.