ElasticSearch Rides The Rails
September 8, 2014
If you have been reading this blog for a while, then you are aware that search is an important feature for using any computer with ease. Without search, people would be forced to scan information one piece at a time or rely on indices. For those who remember microfiche, you can understand. Search in applications has been a semi-fleeting endeavor for some developers, but SitePoint has an article, “Full-Text Search In Rails With ElasticSearch” that explains how to integrate ElasticSearch into a Rails application.
“A full-text search engine examines all of the words in every stored document as it tries to match search criteria (text specified by a user) Wikipedia. For example, if you want to find articles that talk about Rails, you might search using the term “rails”. If you don’t have a special indexing technique, it means fully scanning all records to find matches, which will be extremely inefficient. One way to solve this is an “inverted index” that maps the words in the content of all records to its location in the database.”
As applications become more versatile, they will need to be searched. The article provides one way to make your applications searchable, scan the Web with a search engine and learn about other ways to integrate search. Also make sure that it is a decent search code, otherwise it will not be worth the deployment.
Whitney Grace, September 08, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext