App Engine releases full-text search | Hacker News Reader

App Engine releases full-text search

googleappengine.blogspot.com.es

50 pointsadrinavarro17 comments

Some folks wondered for a long time whether AWS would roll out a search product, and they finally did like 4 weeks ago. And as the blogpost mentions, full-text search has been a long time coming to App Engine. Does anyone have insight into whether the release of CloudSearch caused the App Engine to release this sooner than they otherwise would have?

The full text capability itself is great to have added, no more rolling our own indices / stemmers and taking StringListProperty to the max and using hacks with parent keys[1].

That said, bummed that the compound filtering expressions are apparently not powerful enough to find ranges [2], and therefor filter based on location. Sigh, guess we're still stuck with geoboxes for a while longer.

[1] http://www.billkatz.com/2009/6/Simple-Full-Text-Search-for-A...

[2] http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=72...

interesting to see GAE from Google to have search capabilities coming so late. I have tried to use custom search, however it does not have the same index and quality as the google.com

cool that the search expressions are s-expressions:

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/o...

Huh? Presence of parentheses != s expressions. For starters, the expression "foo" AND "bar" is valid, but not an s expression.

Ha, whoops, you're right. Ironically, I jumped to assume this because internally the "structured search" api was in fact s-expression based (at least as of a couple years ago). Looks like they made it infix for the public api? WTH

IMHO an s-expression api would be awesome, but I think any public facing input would have to allow the "conventional" format. I guess App Engine doesn't want to force app developers to make that conversion.

You know what's wrong with this post? The date! If it was May 8, 2010 instead of May 8, 2012 it would have been something.

hooray! i have been hoping for this for a while.

Why?

It makes a bunch of app ideas that I had feasible.

Was Sphinx too much of a PITA to make those workable before?

Sphinx, Solr[1] etc cannot be run on AppEngine.

[1] Technically you can make Solr run by using a AppEngine port of Lucene and a lot of hacking of the Solr code, but it doesn't work well.

Yeah, I just didn't figure that GAE's limitations would hold him back on a cool idea, so I was wondering if this made cool things much, much easier. The alternative explanation would be that he uses GAE to the exclusion of all else nowadays.

I meant for pet projects is all. I spend too much on VMs otherwise.

Websolr has an AWS US-West region that is close enough to be practical for GAE.

If you are building anything serious, I would avoid GAE! Since their price hike (5-10X) in November you'll be paying 5-10X for the same performance on AWS and even more if you get a good deal on your own dedicated servers.

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