I’m having some difficulty determining what search solution to use in my new iPhone application. The data structure I have is a hierarchy plist that describes a table of contents that link to an HTML file stored locally. I only have two levels in the TOC (Chapter and Section) so it nicely fits into a UITableView with headers and cells. The main content is the text in the HTML files. I want to have a separate view that would allow someone to search for words and have it return relevant documents (In this case sections as described in the plist). All this data is hard coded in the application (it doesn’t change) so hard coding an compiled index into the application is acceptable. There are a few ideas I had. But want opinions on the best and easiest way to implement a search algorithm on an iPhone.
== Reverse word indexing ==
I scan the HTML documents for relevant words and store them in a flat file (plist) with an array of references to those files per word.
Problem is this doesn’t help with more than one word or document relevancy.
== Vector Space Search ==
This seems like a great idea but the logistics on how to implement such a thing seems quite complex especially for a simplistic iPhone application that displays a table of contents and a set of pages. Any ideas on how to implement such a thing?
What recommendations are out there for an iPhone application?
Lucene is decent, and probably easier than writing it yourself.