Word of warning: many in the Rails community believe Ferret/ActsAsFerret is totally unable to handle a production environment, even WITH distributed ruby.
You're probably better off with Acts_as_solr + Solr or Ultrasphinx + Sphinx. I personally can recommend Sphinx -- it's like nginx, very fast and Russian. =)
The syntax / setup process is similar to Acts as Ferret, only instead the search indexer / daemons are running Java (Solr, based on Lucene) and Sphinx (native).
I can second the recommendation for Ultrasphinx. Ferret is like a bad word in many Ruby development circles. I'm not a search expert, but I know some talented guys and they all say Sphinx is the way to go (even over Solr).
Indeed. I'm in the middle of switching Insoshi from Ferret to Sphinx (http://insoshi.lighthouseapp.com/projects/9331/tickets/17-mo...), for all the usual reasons. It hasn't been as easy as I'd hoped, but it's the right thing to do. A blog post describing my experiences is also in the works.
You're probably better off with Acts_as_solr + Solr or Ultrasphinx + Sphinx. I personally can recommend Sphinx -- it's like nginx, very fast and Russian. =)
The syntax / setup process is similar to Acts as Ferret, only instead the search indexer / daemons are running Java (Solr, based on Lucene) and Sphinx (native).
Here's a great thread about it on ruby-forum.com: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137629