Simon Willison’s Weblog

Haystack 1.0 Final Released. I’ve used Haystack on a number of projects recently, and it has proved itself as a completely painless way of adding full-text search (using Solr or Whoosh—I haven’t tried the Xapian backend yet) to a Django ORM powered project in just a few minutes. Congratulations, Daniel + contributors.

# 30th November 2009, 8:07 am / django, haystack, daniel-lindsley, search, solr, whoosh, python

Haystack (via) A brand new modular search plugin for Django, by Daniel Lindsley. The interface is modelled after the Django ORM (complete with declarative classes for defining your search schema) and it ships with backends for both Solr and pure-python Whoosh, with more on the way. Excellent documentation.

# 17th April 2009, 9:53 pm / django, python, search, haystack, whoosh, solr, orm, daniel-lindsley

Xapian performance comparision with Whoosh. Whoosh appears to be around four times slower than Xapian for indexing and empty cache searches, but Xapian with a full cache blows Whoosh out of the water (5408 searches/second compared to 26.3). Considering how fast Xapian is, that’s still a pretty impressive result for the pure-Python Whoosh.

# 14th February 2009, 1:15 pm / whoosh, xapian, search, full-text-search, python, richard-boulton

Whoosh. A brand new, pure-python full text indexing engine (think Lucene). Claims to offer performance in the same league as wrappers to C or Java libraries. If this works as well as it claims it will be an excellent tool for adding search to projects that wish to avoid a dependency on an external engine.

# 12th February 2009, 12:49 pm / search, python, whoosh, lucene, open-source, full-text-search