

App Engine releases full-text search - adrinavarro
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/looking-for-search-find-it-on-google.html

======
abeppu
Some folks wondered for a long time whether AWS would roll out a search
product, and they finally did like 4 weeks ago. And as the blogpost mentions,
full-text search has been a long time coming to App Engine. Does anyone have
insight into whether the release of CloudSearch caused the App Engine to
release this sooner than they otherwise would have?

------
krosaen
The full text capability itself is great to have added, no more rolling our
own indices / stemmers and taking StringListProperty to the max and using
hacks with parent keys[1].

That said, bummed that the compound filtering expressions are apparently not
powerful enough to find ranges [2], and therefor filter based on location.
Sigh, guess we're still stuck with geoboxes for a while longer.

[1] [http://www.billkatz.com/2009/6/Simple-Full-Text-Search-
for-A...](http://www.billkatz.com/2009/6/Simple-Full-Text-Search-for-App-
Engine)

[2]
[http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=72...](http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=7247)

------
diminish
interesting to see GAE from Google to have search capabilities coming so late.
I have tried to use custom search, however it does not have the same index and
quality as the google.com

------
krosaen
cool that the search expressions are s-expressions:

[https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/o...](https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/overview#Query_Language_Overview)

~~~
axiak
Huh? Presence of parentheses != s expressions. For starters, the expression
"foo" AND "bar" is valid, but not an s expression.

~~~
krosaen
Ha, whoops, you're right. Ironically, I jumped to assume this because
internally the "structured search" api was in fact s-expression based (at
least as of a couple years ago). Looks like they made it infix for the public
api? WTH

~~~
axiak
IMHO an s-expression api would be awesome, but I think any public facing input
would have to allow the "conventional" format. I guess App Engine doesn't want
to force app developers to make that conversion.

------
salimmadjd
You know what's wrong with this post? The date! If it was May 8, 2010 instead
of May 8, 2012 it would have been something.

------
joshu
hooray! i have been hoping for this for a while.

~~~
pw
Why?

~~~
joshu
It makes a bunch of app ideas that I had feasible.

~~~
ericd
Was Sphinx too much of a PITA to make those workable before?

~~~
nl
Sphinx, Solr[1] etc cannot be run on AppEngine.

[1] Technically you can make Solr run by using a AppEngine port of Lucene and
a lot of hacking of the Solr code, but it doesn't work well.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, I just didn't figure that GAE's limitations would hold him back on a
cool idea, so I was wondering if this made cool things much, much easier. The
alternative explanation would be that he uses GAE to the exclusion of all else
nowadays.

~~~
joshu
I meant for pet projects is all. I spend too much on VMs otherwise.

