Ferret is a high performance text search engine for Ruby. Inspired by the Java Lucene project, it brings state-of-the-art search technology to the Ruby world. While powerful, integrating Ferret for full-text search can be hard, especially for those who are new to full-text indexing in general.

Acts_as_ferret strives to make the Ferret experience as painless as possible. It does so by integrating tightly with the object life cycle of ActiveRecord: creating or saving a record will update the index; destroying a record will remove it from the index.

This talk will, after a look at the basics of Ferret, show how acts_as_ferret can be used to solve common search use cases ranging from simple full-text search to live searches, complex search forms, and special indexing scenarios. Deployment best practices will be covered, too.