Question

Google app engine already has Prospective search in its experimental feature at least for python. How this prospective search is different from currently available full text engine alternatives? How efficient it is for real world web application, say product search.

current full text alternatives are,

1. Bill Katz’s solution
2. Django based solution
3. gae-text-search, another python based solution

Answer 1

Prospective search is basically the App Engine equivalent of tail -f | grep. Instead of running a query once against a static set of documents, users subscribe to a set of queries, and newly created documents are matched against open queries. If a match occurs, a task is enqueued, and inside the task you might use the Channel API to update the user’s browser with new query results.

Prospective search has nothing to do with full text search. There is a full text API in the works for App Engine, discussed in this Google I/O talk:

http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/full-text-search.html