This morning I read a great post by Arne where he introduced me to Whoosh, a pure-Python search back-end. Traditionally when you’re working with site-specific search-technologies, you sooner or later stumble upon the Lucene ecosystem (since there is a whole forest of applications surrounding it, I guess you could really call it an ecosystem by now). Lucene might be the best thing since the invention of sliced bread but especially for smaller sites it might just be too much configuration overhead. Surely, some of the applications and libraries around Lucene have made that whole process much easier – Solango comes to mind, there – but that might still not be enough.
Whoosh on the other hand appears to be quite Python-targeted (while Lucene goes after any environment) with a very simple configuration- and operation-workflow: Create a storage, create an index above it, define what should be indexed, hand the index a document you want to index according to your schema, done. No running some Java application in the background, no XML-schema declarations.
I’m not yet sure, if I will go with Whoosh or Solango for the next iteration of this site but Arne definitely provided me with yet another option to think about, thanks :-)
There are a couple of aspects I’m not yet really sure about with Whoosh, though. For example, the searcher (the thing that you pass your query to receive the actual hits) doesn’t seem to provide any offset mechanism. This way, running any kind of pagination over the result-set would end up being a bit of a problem. But perhaps there is already a solution for this out there :-)
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