Here’s another semantic search tool for Web application developers: Picky, a “a semantic text search engine for categorized data, such as varchar fields from a database.” It’s written in Ruby and you can grab the source here.
The developer, Florian Hanke, emphasizes that Picky is not a replacement for for full text search engines like Sphinx and Lucene. It’s just for searching small, structured data very quickly.
The features include:
- Flexibly configure indexing
- Easily configure handling query text, e.g. splits_text_on: /[s/-“&]/
- Multiple data sources (DB, CSV, …)
- Choice of in-memory or Redis indexes.
- Partial searching, pick*
- Phonetic similarity, pecky~
- Categorized searching, napoleon, title:war
- Weighing not only categories, but combinations! { [:title, :author] => +3, [:isbn, :author] => -5 }
- Range queries
- Comfortable routing, route %r{/books} => book_query
You can find out more on the features page.
