Sunspot: A Solr-Powered Search Engine for Ruby

As your site amasses content — be it stories, SKUs, or statistics — a tailored, effective, and exacting search engine becomes increasingly vital. Imagine a bookstore that doesn’t index its tomes by title or author, or a clothing retailer that doesn’t index garments by size. Without search, each site is useless. In general, the quality and relevance of search results makes or breaks a site.

Typically, at least some search results are generated by the site’s underlying database. A database can maintain and catalog enormous volumes of data.