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Picky website update
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floere committed Nov 18, 2014
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang='en' xml:lang='en' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<head>
<meta content='text/html; charset=utf-8' http-equiv='Content-Type'>
<meta content='EN' http-equiv='Content-Language'>
<meta content='Florian Hanke, florianhanke.com' name='author'>
<meta content='picky, ruby, single field, semantic small text, search engine, light, lightweight' name='keywords'>
<meta content='Picky: The fast and easy to configure Ruby search engine' name='abstract'>
<meta content='Picky: The fast and easy to configure Ruby search engine. Offers a server, a client, and a statistics interface.' name='description'>
<meta content='index, follow' name='robots'>
<meta content='3 days' name='revisit-after'>

<link href='favicon.ico' rel='shortcut icon'>
<link href='stylesheets/basic.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<link href='stylesheets/specific.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<link href='stylesheets/grid.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<link href='stylesheets/colors.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<link href='stylesheets/solarized_code.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

<script src='javascripts/highlight.bash.ruby.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">function plusone_vote(obj){_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','plusone',obj.state]);}</script>

<title>
Picky:
In Detail
</title>

<script>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-20991642-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

</head>
<body onload='hljs.initHighlighting();'>
<div class='header'>
<a href='http://github.com/floere/picky'>
<img alt='Fork me on GitHub' src='images/forkme.png' style='position: fixed; top: -10px; right: -10px; border: 0; z-index: 1;'>
</a>
</div>

<div class='picky' title='Happy Picky (drawn on iPhone)'></div>

<div class='container_2'>
<h1>Picky</h1>
<div class='navigation'>
<a class='' href='index.html'>get started</a>
<a class='' href='examples.html'>examples</a>
<a class='' href='documentation.html'>documentation</a>
<a class='current ' href='details.html'>about</a>
<a class='right' href='enterprise.html'>business</a>
<a class='right' href='status.html'>contribute</a>
<a class='right' href='features.html'>features</a>
<a class='right' href='videos.html'>screencasts</a>
</div>

</div>
<div class='container_2'>
<h2>
In Detail
<div class='social'>
<!-- script id='fbda0ml'>(function(i){var f,s=document.getElementById(i);f=document.createElement('iframe');f.src='//api.flattr.com/button/view/?uid=hanke&button=compact&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpickyrb.com';f.title='Flattr';f.height=20;f.width=110;f.style.borderWidth=0;s.parentNode.insertBefore(f,s);})('fbda0ml');</script -->
<a class='twitter-follow-button' data-show-count='false' data-width='110px' href='https://twitter.com/hanke'>Follow @hanke</a>
<a class='twitter-follow-button' data-show-count='false' data-width='123px' href='https://twitter.com/picky_rb'>Follow @picky_rb</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://pickyrb.com" data-via="picky_rb" data-text="Picky: The fast Ruby semantic search engine">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script>
<div callback='plusone_vote' class='g-plusone' data-href='http://florianhanke.com/picky/' data-size='medium' data-width='60'></div>
<script src='http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
</div>

</h2>
</div>
<div class='container_2'>
<div class='grid_1'>
<h3>Huh? What's a semantic text search engine?</h3>
<p>
A semantic text search engine does not operate on huge blobs of text, but instead on smaller, highly categorized text amounts. For example, on varchar database fields.
</p>
<p>
If your data isn't categorized well (like text from a book), then you should instead choose a full-text search engine, like
<a href='http://sphinxsearch.com/'>Sphinx</a>
or
<a href='http://lucene.apache.org/solr/'>Solr (Lucene)</a>.
</p>
<h3>Then why use it?</h3>
<p>
Often, full-text search engines are misused by letting them loose on highly categorized (semantic) text.
</p>
<p>
Picky helps your user find data which in a full-text search engine would be buried in a heap of results. Also, it lets him do so with a Google-y single search field.
</p>
<p>
Sure the word "peter" is found most often in document #7, but he actually just wants documents by someone with surname "Peter", and not everything related to peters.
</p>
<p>
Picky helps him refine his search by way of a comfortable interface to get exactly what he wants.
</p>
<h3>But why not use a full-text search engine?</h3>
<p>
Full-Text search engines do one thing especially well: Making full (i.e. uncategorized heaps of) text searchable.
</p>
<p>
For small, highly categorized text, we simply need new ideas. Picky is one of them.
</p>
<p>
Ok, that was my elevator pitch ;)
</p>
<h3>See me show (it) off</h3>
<p>
Using a real
<a href='http://twixtel.ch'>telephone search</a>
as an example.
</p>
<iframe frameborder='0' height='365' src='http://player.vimeo.com/video/12614970' width='460'></iframe>
<p>
This was at the fantastic
<a href='http://euruko2010.org/'>EuRuKo 2010</a>
Conference in
<a href='http://www.google.ch/images?q=krakow+poland'>beautiful</a>
Krakow.
</p>
<h3>Why would one write a search engine in Ruby?</h3>
<p>
It's fast enough and the high level really helped understanding it as it evolved. There are some parts that have been written in pedal-to-the-metal C code.
</p>
<h3>How does it perform?</h3>
<p>
This depends on many factors, but generally we recommend using Picky with a maximum of 150 million data points, i.e. words (we used it there).
The area under 20 millions is probably best. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on how many partial indexes you use etc.
</p>
<p>
See the
<a href='enterprise.html'>use case</a>
in the enterprise section.
</p>
<p>
Indexing is not too fast, and I'd be glad if it were faster. However, you get the full power of Ruby and fully customizable indexing.
</p>
</div>
<div class='grid_1'>
<h3>Why the octopus?</h3>
<p>
Glad you asked. But first, read this
<a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus'>Wikipedia entry about octopuses</a>.
Also,
<a href='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=badHUNl2HXU'>a movie</a>.
Finished? I think that sums it up pretty well. And it's cuuute, don't you think? :)
</p>
<p>
But don't call him that. He likes to be called "Octor the Destroyer".
</p>
<h3>Who wrote it?</h3>
<p>
Mainly me,
<a href='http://florianhanke.com'>Florian Hanke</a>,
but I also had
<a href='status.html'>excellent help</a>
by friends and coworkers.
</p>
<h3>Why the LGPL license?</h3>
<p>
I'd have preferred a MIT license. In the end it was a compromise between my former employer and me.
</p>
<h3>Roadmap</h3>
<p>
<a href='http://github.com/floere/picky/wiki/Roadmap'>Wiki Roadmap</a>
</p>
<h3>Alternatives</h3>
<p>
There aren't many
<strong>real</strong>
Ruby search engines. Just more or less elegant adapters for existing ones. I found two real ones:
</p>
<p>
<a href='http://masanjin.net/whistlepig/'>Whistlepig</a>
by William Morgan.
"Whistlepig is a minimalist real-time full-text search".
</p>
<p>
<a href='https://github.com/rstacruz/ion'>Ion</a>
by Rico Sta. Cruz.
A Ruby search engine based on a Redis backend.
</p>
</div>
<div class='grid_1'>
<h3>Help / Feedback</h3>
<p>
We're always glad for help requests, feedback, single-page scripts, project battle stories:
</p>
<p>
<a href='http://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/picky-ruby'>Share it in the mailing list</a>
</p>
<p>
For quick info updates,
<a href='http://twitter.com/picky_rb'>follow Picky</a>
on twitter.
</p>
<p>
You might also find excellent Pickyists on IRC in
<a href='http://webchat.freenode.net/'>#picky</a>
that can also help.
</p>
<p>
<img src='http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/de2d64478e715fb02266f77a3f5641f6?size=90'>
<br>
This webpage & the images on it have been designed by me,
<a href='http://florianhanke.com'>Florian Hanke</a>
<a href='http://twitter.com/hanke'>@hanke</a>
aka "Flöre", or "Floere" – if you have personal feedback on anything, I'm pleased to hear it.
</p>
</div>
</div>

<div class='license'>
Logos and all images are
<a href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/'>CC Attribution</a>
licensed to Florian Hanke.
</div>

<div class='footer'></div>
<script>
var picky = document.getElementsByClassName('picky')[0];
var footer = document.getElementsByClassName('footer')[0];

var position = 0;

var movePicky = function() {
if (position == -2780) {
position = 0;
} else {
position -= 20;
setTimeout(movePicky,5);
}
picky.style.backgroundPositionY = position + "px";
}

footer.onclick = function() {
setTimeout(movePicky,5);
};
</script>

</body>
</html>
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