Lately I’ve been searching for a simple solution for full-text Model search using Django. Every task up to this point just seemed so easy, so I was a bit surprised to discover there’s no quick, clean and preferred way to go about adding site search functionality in the framework.
So far, the information I read seems to suggest existing solutions are:
- Based on a dedicated full-text search module
- djangosearch
- Supposed to become the official search contrib. Rather recent history (during 2008).
- It’s an framework over existing, dedicated full text indexing engines:
- Lucene (Java version)
- Solr (still Java, and also based on Lucene)
- Xapian (C++)
- HyperEstraier
- django-sphinx
- Wrapper around Sphinx full-text search engine
- djangosearch
- Based on a database engine full-text capability (ie. you must create full text indexes with appropriate DB commands)
- For the MySQL backend, there’s already a “fieldname__search” syntax already supported in the framework, translating into a MATCH AGAINST query in SQL.
- Supports basic boolean operators
- Reference (look at the conclusion of the article)
- For PostgreSQL, depending on the version of the engine, there are solutions, but they seem complex, relative to the MySQL approach
- For the MySQL backend, there’s already a “fieldname__search” syntax already supported in the framework, translating into a MATCH AGAINST query in SQL.
- Most simple, but very inefficient: based on a simple LIKE %keyword% query
- Uses the “fieldname__icontains” filter syntax
- That’s what I used temporarily for get the feature going in my prototype
Other approaches are mentioned in this thread on StackOverflow.