Question

I want to enable the user to search for other users across multiple columns in the user model. Namely the first_name, last_name, and email fields. I’m doing MySQL full text search for now but I’m not convinced that’s the right way for me to proceed. Does anybody know how MySQL full text searching stacks up against Solr and other third party providers?

I’m looking at searchify and websolr as potentials. But for 1 table to do full text searching across 3 columns, would it be worth it?

Answer 1

Searching against the database itself is rather slow. The recommended approach is using a search engine, like Solr, Whoosh, etc to generate the indexes. Haystack is a very useful django app that let’s you abstract the search engines and have templates to use when indexing.

So with the template you can have a template like:

{{user.first_name}}
{{user. last_name}}
{{user.email}}

And it will generate the search results you’re looking for.