Chapter 12. Searching and indexing

This chapter covers

  • Searching databases
  • Indexing content using Ferret and Solr
  • Searching with other technologies
  • The scraping technique

Throughout this book, and throughout your entire programming life, you’ve been used to dealing with data, because it forms the input and output for all computer programs. So far, we have mostly looked at transforming data from one state to another, but in this chapter we’re going to investigate Ruby’s abilities to let you search through data.

Unfortunately, as a language that has reached maturity only in the last few years, Ruby is not blessed with hundreds of search-related libraries. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as search technologies progress quickly, and most of ...

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