Solr on Rails Erik Hatcher
Ferret is fast. He has moved around and the documentation is a bit sparse.
Solr was created by people at CNET, used by Internet Archive, Krugle, Revolution Health, his projects: Collext, Blacklight.
Findability - serendipity is great. You should be able to browse and discover stuff you didn't intend to.
Read Ambient Findability
Lucene is fast and scalable. Written in Java.
Solr is a layer on top of Lucene.
Flare is a plugin he wrote that is a bit of a hack but does "faceted browsing, auto-suggest, folksonomy tagging/annotating."
Adds caching, replication, faceting, highlighting, spell checking, Http interface.
You can talk to it via Net::HTTP::Post or use solr-ruby (gem), acts_as_solr (will hopefully use gem soon, Hatcher submitted a patch)
gem install solr-ruby
Look at the code in his slides.
Luke is a tool that lets you view your lucene index.
This is a pretty sweet tool for adding search to your site. I plan on looking into it further.
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Daniel
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Manik
Justin Ball is a software consultant and entrepreneur with a passion for Ruby. He evolved from a C++ and .Net monkey into a python programmer and finally found Ruby. In the rare moments when he isn't writing code, talking about code or measuring his code productivity in profanity per hour, you can find him on his bike in the mountains or on the roads surrounding Cache Valley. 
