Question

I am building a rails app where users can post, must like a form. I want users to be able to search through the posts with a text field, and then all records will be returned where the post content is similar to the user query. For example, a user enters:

'albert einstein atomic bomb'

Then, I want a to run a query where every word is checked, along with the query itself. Something like:

query_result = Hash.new
query_result << Post.where('content ILIKE ?', "%albert%")
query_result << Post.where('content ILIKE ?', "%einstein%")
query_result << Post.where('content ILIKE ?', "%atomic%")
query_result << Post.where('content ILIKE ?', "%bomb%")
query_result << Post.where('content ILIKE ?', "%albert einstein atomic bomb%")

This will not work of course, but I hope you get the idea. Any and all input would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use sunspot gem for stuff like this. Once it’s setup you can do searches like so

# Posts with the exact phrase "great pizza"
Post.search do
  fulltext '"great pizza"'
end

# One word can appear between the words in the phrase, so "great big pizza"
# also matches, in addition to "great pizza"
Post.search do
  fulltext '"great pizza"' do
    query_phrase_slop 1
  end
end

and more. See the info in the link.