[elephant-devel] full text search solution?

[Ian Eslick]

Hello,

Has anyone found a good solution for full text search in lisp?  I'm  
interested in indexing website objects such as posts and perhaps  
external documents as well.   BDB doesn't, to the best of my  
knowledge, have the appropriate building blocks for an efficient  
indexing system and you certainly don't want to do it on top of the  
current btree interface.

I have an old full text index code base that supported wildcard and  
NEAR queries, all built on top of Elephant btrees.   It was convenient  
but had a query time that slowed down linearly with the avg # of  
documents per word.

I've decided that the best approach for me is to connect to a  
separate, probably external, system to which I can incrementally add  
content that will return something I can easily turn into an ordered  
list of OIDs.

Most solutions I've run across require other languages, servers that  
add up to needless complexity for my modest application.  In the lisp  
world I've only seen Montezuma, which isn't being developed or  
seriously maintained (unless it's just really stable I'd rather not  
fight with stale code).

I am considering hacking something simple on top of postmodern that  
uses the new text indexing functions of Postgresql 8.3 and wondered if  
anyone here has insight into this application of postmodern or into  
the full-text indexing from lisp problem in general.

Thank you,
Ian