I'm currently trying to build the functionality directly in django's
ORM as a cascade of functions that would retrieve matches in decreasing
relevance, eg:

class Article(meta.Model):
    title = meta.CharField()
    description = meta.TextField()
    keywords = meta.CharField()

def search(request, term):
    matches = []
    matches.extend(findExactTitle(term))
    matches.extend(findInTitle(term))
    matches.extend(findInKeywords(term))
    matches.extend(findInDescription(term))

    render_to_response('search_results', {'matches': matches}

Any ideas?  Suggestions?

I haven't yet had an opportunity to use it myself, but it seems to be
what you're looking for.

--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house."
  -- George Carlin

At World Online, the search engine (lawrence.com/search,
ljworld.com/search) uses swish-e (http://swish-e.org/) to index files.

We made a small script that reads a custom Django setting
(FULL_TEXT_INDEXING) to find out which models need to be indexed. The
indexer runs on a regular basis; for each to-be-indexed model, it
grabs all items in the system using get_list() (with optional limiting
kwargs designated in FULL_TEXT_INDEXING), renders each result in a
template according to its content type, and indexes the resulting
rendered template.

Then, when somebody does a search on the site, we use swish-e's Python
bindings to retrieve the IDs of the objects that match the search
criteria. Then we use Django's get_in_bulk() to retrieve the actual
objects. get_in_bulk() takes a list of IDs and returns a dictionary of
{id: object}. (Trivia: get_in_bulk() was created to solve this exact
problem.)

Hope that helps! It would be pretty cool to open-source this mini
search framework and pop it in django/contrib, but that would be up to
Jacob to decide.

Adrian

--
Adrian Holovaty
holovaty.com | djangoproject.com | chicagocrime.org

Jacob

Doesn't Swish-e pose an incompatibility for licensing? Everything Django
has been BSD up to this point and I would hate to see anything alter
this. Isn't swish-e gpl?

Regards,
David