Today I wanted to let you know about a very handy library: mongoid_fulltext, an open-source full-text search implementation for your MongoId models in Ruby.

 

https://github.com/aaw/mongoid_fulltext

We’ve been using mongoid_search for sometime now for auto-complete. It’s a fine component that splits sentences and uses MongoDB to index them. Unfortunately it doesn’t rank them, so results come in order of appearance. In contrast, mongoid-fulltext uses n-gram matching (with n=3 right now), so we index all of the substrings of length 3 from text that we want to search on. If you search for "damian hurst", mongoid_fulltext does lookups for "dam", "ami", "mia", "ian", "an ", "n h", " hu", "hur", "urs", and "rst" and combines the results to get a most likely match. This also means users can make simple spelling mistakes and still find something relevant. In addition, you can index multiple collections in a single index, producing best matching results within several models. Finally, mongoid-fulltext leverages MongoDB native indexing and map-reduce.

 

This library is written by @aaw, who implements most of art.sy search technology. All due credit goes entirely to him.