Full-Text Search Hosting - IndexTank vs Solr vs Lucene

Question

I am building an application using Ruby on Rails on Heroku, and I am confused about which option of full-text search I should continue. A few things that concern me:

• Real-time search: I am creating a dynamic custom website.
• Understands the Rails Models: I would like to limit the search results based on who the user is (so I really don't want to “just“ search the entire site ”)

Also, something that’s easy to configure on Heroku with Rails will be a bonus.

Heroku currently provides three full-text search options: FlyingSphinx , IndexTank Search, and WebSolr . Can anyone describe the pros and cons of each.

Based on my research, it seems that many people were happy with IndexTank. In particular, this Gautam Rege blog post summarizes his experience with three options and how he prefers IndexTank.

However, after the acquisition of LinkedIn IndexTank, some of the key components of IndexTank were open source, and IndexTank was discontinued. Searchify seems to be one of the first (if not currently) the only replacement for IndexTank. Does anyone have any experience using this? How does Searchify compare with IndexTank and two other options - WebSolr and FlyingSphinx?

Answer 1

I will consider your question regarding Searchify / IndexTank:

• Search has true real-time indexing. In millisecond you add a document, it becomes searchable. No need to commit or reindex.

• There is a Ruby client library for searching, here are documents and download links: http://www.searchify.com/documentation/ruby-client

There is also a good kidpollo third-party client called Tanker, which some people from Ruby prefer: https://github.com/kidpollo/tanker