At AboutUs where I work we recently re-implemented the site’s search feature. Behind the scenes the new search uses Sphinx (a super-fast and scalable search engine) and Thinking Sphinx (which allows easy configuration and querying of Sphinx from within Rails).

One thing that makes Sphinx so much faster than alternatives like Solr is that it communicates directly with your database when it is building its search index. This is far faster than talking with your application layer, and indexing the result of your application models’ methods. In our case we’re able to reindex about 40 million records in around 4 hours. Solr used to take days.

One of the handiest tools in my programming toolkit is ack, a Perl script that is great for searching through code (or really any text files). I use it a lot while refactoring, for example when I want to rename a method every time it’s called in a project.

$curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 ~/bin/ack 

Assuming that ~/bin/ack is in your path searching code is as easy as this:

$ ack my_poorly_named_method

Here’s a really simple method for creating an instant search for a list of items. It lets you quickly filter a long list or table down to the few items you’re looking for.

First here’s a demo.

What’s nice is this only takes a few lines of code (and the magic of jQuery.)

$().ready(function(){
  // Instant Search
  $('#q').keyup(function(){
    $('.search_item').each(function(){
      var re = new RegExp($('#q').val(), 'i')
      if($(this).children('.search_text')[0].innerHTML.match(re)){
        $(this).show();
      }else{
        $(this).hide();
      };
    });
  });
});