Django and fulltext search

Lately I’ve been searching for a simple solution for full-text Model search using Django. Every task up to this point just seemed so easy, so I was a bit surprised to discover there’s no quick, clean and preferred way to go about adding site search functionality in the framework.

So far, the information I read seems to suggest existing solutions are:

• Based on a dedicated full-text search module
  • djangosearch
    • Supposed to become the official search contrib. Rather recent history (during 2008).
    • It’s an framework over existing, dedicated full text indexing engines:
      • Lucene (Java version)
      • Solr (still Java, and also based on Lucene)
      • Xapian (C++)
      • HyperEstraier
  • django-sphinx
    • Wrapper around Sphinx full-text search engine
• Based on a database engine full-text capability (ie. you must create full text indexes with appropriate DB commands)
  • For the MySQL backend, there’s already a “fieldname__search” syntax already supported in the framework, translating into a MATCH AGAINST query in SQL.
    • Supports basic boolean operators
    • Reference (look at the conclusion of the article)
  • For PostgreSQL, depending on the version of the engine, there are solutions, but they seem complex, relative to the MySQL approach
• Most simple, but very inefficient: based on a simple LIKE %keyword% query
  • Uses the “fieldname__icontains” filter syntax
  • That’s what I used temporarily for get the feature going in my prototype

Other approaches are mentioned in this thread on StackOverflow.