Rails 4 search options. What options are available to combine a full HTML site search with an ActiveRecord search?

Question

I'm looking for a solution that combines the power of Google Site Search with Elasticsearch for a Rails 4 app preferably as a Rails gem.

As far as I can tell the most popular search solutions, ThinkingSphinx, ElasticSearch with the tire gem, Sunspot Solr and lastly PostreSQL searching functionality, all seem to only handle database searching and do not have page/html template searching functionality.

If I have this wrong then please correct me and I will happily pick one of the above.

The site contains mainly static HTML so the Google Site Search api is the obvious solution but there are some ActiveRecord results that should also be included in the results of a search.

If there really isn't a simple combined solution then I would appreciate any pointers as to how to achieve the merging of an elasticsearch (my preffered AR search solution) with a google site search where the results happen to include the same pages so page results are not duplicated.

Answer 1

To rephrase your question, you want to combine results of Google Site Search with custom search results provided by Sphinx, Solr or Elasticsearch?

First, you cannot really customize the content of Google Site Search results easily. You can customize the design, and could employ some JavaScript tricks to "merge" its results with another data source, but I'd say the approach is not something maintainable and, more importantly, usable.

Notice, that you can display the search results from Elasticsearch with Tire in the same way as ActiveRecord instances, all the usual Rails helpers such as url_for etc. work. The easiest way to evaluate the integration is to generate the example application with the Rails template.

If you want to combine the results from ActiveRecord data and the results from any static pages you might have on your site/application, it wouldn't be hard to write a simple crawler which would retrieve, parse and index the content of static pages and store it as ActiveModel-compatible documents in Elasticsearch.