

How-to: create a real-time search app with IndexTank and Heroku - diego
http://blog.indextank.com/132/creating-real-time-search-engine-indextank-heroku/

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barmstrong
I played with IndexTank a bit this past weekend, and it seems like they are
really hurting from lack of a good gem that fits into Active Record. When
compared to something like ThinkingSphinx or a project like that it feels very
un rails-ish.

I noticed this project has cropped up to try and solve it, which is awesome:
<https://github.com/flaptor/thinkingtank> however it's not Rails 3 compatible
right now.

If I were IndexTank, getting a gem like that up to speed would be my top
priority I think to get real traction on Heroku or amongst rails folks.

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gregwebs
Why would one want to use IndexTank instead of Sphinx Search?

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jhandl
IndexTank is a hosted service, you don't have to build, configure or manage
your own search infrastructure.

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samd
When I first saw the contest I was only thinking about indexing all the
existing data from some website, but clearly it's better to just start
indexing the new data, and get a website up and running. Later I could write
another program that fetches and indexes the old data in the background.
Thanks for writing this, it gave me some new ideas.

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Blankwood
I see I can get a free 1million size account for the contest at heroku. How
big is that for this type of application, like you show in the tutorial?

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diego
My app is using 25k docs. What I described in the article is very basic, the
app that you can try at <http://plixitank.heroku.com> keeps a window of the
25k most recent items from Plixi and erases older stuff. That's enough for
several hours' worth of search history.

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Blankwood
Just saw that you also built trendistic. How big is that index? Am trying to
get a feel for the size of index to make a compelling contest entry.

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santip
Trendistic is a special-purpose app with several millions of documents.
However, the contest accounts are limited to 1M documents so don't worry much
about the size. You could try an interesting approach at indexing tweets and
should be more than fine choosing up to 1M tweets with some criteria, be it
recentness, popularity of the author or something else. You can contact us
directly if you have other specific questions, support [at] indextank or
through the chat box on our site.

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diego
This is because many people asked us for ideas for the contest. It's a sample
app built from the ground up.

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eidorianu
diego, what was the language used to implement that search engine back in 98'?

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diego
C, I probably still have that source code around. It was very rudimentary: an
inverted index with no relevance, only AND queries (intersection of word
vectors). I had the index mmap'ed because it was pretty small.

