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thinking_sphinx and sphinx work beautifully, no indexing, query, install problems ever (5 or 6 install, including production slicehost )
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why doesn’t everybody use sphinx, like, say craigslist? read here about its limitations (year and a half old articles. The sphinx developer, Aksyonoff, is working on these and he’s putting in features and reliability and stamping out bugs at an amazing pace)
http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2008/01/09/sphinx-for-search/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-apachesolr/
Comparison of full text search engine – Lucene, Sphinx, Postgresql, MySQL?
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ferret: easy install, doesn’t stem properly, very slow indexing (one mysql db: sphinx: 3 seconds, ferret: 50 minutes). Well documented problems (index corruption) in drb servers in production under load. Having said that, i have use it in develometn since acts-as_ferret came out 3 years ago, and it has served me well. Not adhering to porter stemming is an advantage in some contexts.
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Lucene and Solr is the gorilla/mack truck / heavyweight champ of open source search. The teams have been doing an impressive number of new features in solr 14 release:
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acts-as-solr: works well, once the tomcat or jetty is in place, but those sometimes are a pain. The A-A-S fork by mattmatt is the main fork, but the project is relatively unmaintained.
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re the tomcat install: SOLR/lucene has unquestionably the best knowledge base/ support search engine of any software package i’ve seen ( i guess i’m not that surprised), the search box here:
http://www.lucidimagination.com/
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Sunspot the new ruby wrapper, build on solr-ruby. Looks promising, but I couldn’t get it to install on OSX. Indexes all ruby objects, not just databases through AR
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one thing that’s really instructive is to install 2 search plugins, e.g. sphinx and SOLR, sphinx and ferret, and see what different results they return. It’s as easy as
@sphinx_results - @ferret_results
just saw this post and responses
http://zooie.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/a-comparison-of-open-source-search-engines-and-indexing-twitter/
http://www.jroller.com/otis/entry/open_source_search_engine_benchmark
http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2009/07/07/xapian-compared/