Facet Searching using Ultrasphinx

Faceted browsing
using
UltraSphinx

About me
A passionate rails developer
Author of
Rails plugin State Select
Bash and ruby utility scripts
Work with Vinsol
Blog: http://webonrails.com

Traditional Search Tools
Designed to retrieve information
Situations in which the user knows exactly what he wants
Perform quite badly in most real situations
Buying a digital camera
Finding a Job
Selecting a photo
Finding a restaurant

Facets?
Attributes of an Object in various categories
Examples:
Music catalog: songs have attributes such as album, artist, title, length, date...
Recipes: cuisine, main ingredients, cooking style...
Content Site: articles have authors, dates, category, tags...
Image collection: artist, date, style, type of image, major colors, theme...

Faceted Search
Drilling down search results using dynamic taxonomies called Facets

Faceted Search
Includes exposing the facets in dynamic taxonomies
Allows user
To see exact options they have available to drill down the result
To switch easily between searching and browsing, using their own terminology for search

Features Faceted Search
Displaying various aspects of the current results set in multiple categorizations
Showing only populated categories, no dead-ends (links leading to empty lists)
To see exactly the options they have available at that time
Displaying a count of the contents of each category

When we need Faceted Search?
User need to filter content using multiple taxonomy terms
User want to combine text searches, taxonomy term filtering, and other search criteria
User don't know precisely what they can find on your site, or what to search for
Users often get empty result sets when searching your site
Site has too much content for it to be displayed through fixed navigational structures
"advanced" search forms are not fun to use

Quick look at Ultrasphinx features
Searching and ranking across multiple models
Delta index support
Excerpt highlighting
Google-style query parser
Spellcheck
Faceting on text, date, and numeric fields
Field weighting, merging, and aliasing
Belongs_to and has_many includes
Drop-in compatibility with will_paginate

Indexing Data
Article Model
is_indexed :fields => [
'created_at',
'title',
{:field => 'body', :as => 'description'},
{:field => 'category', :facet => true, :as => 'category_name' }
],
:conditions => "status = 'published' ",
:include => [{:association_name => 'Author', :field => 'name', :as => 'author_name'}]

Preparing index withUltrasphinx
rake ultrasphinx:configure
rake ultrasphinx:index
rake ultrasphinx:daemon:start

Running Queries
@search = Ultrasphinx::Search.new(:query => @query, :class_names => 'Article', :per_page => 20)
@search.run
@search.results

Lets do it practically

Use Case
We have a Product model and we want to implement search on its various fields. Also we want to use its brand, category and celebration* as facets.
* Occassion when a product can be used

Product Model
is_indexed :fields => [ :description, :name,
{:field => :celebration, :facet => true}
],
:include => [
{ :association_name => 'brand', :field => 'name', :facet=>true, :as => 'brand',
:association_sql => "left outer join brands brand on products.brand_id =
brand.id"
},
{ :class_name => "Category", :field => 'title', :facet=>true, :as => 'category',
:association_sql => "left outer join categories on category.id =
products.category_id"}
]

Prepare index and start search daemon
rake ultrasphinx:configure
rake ultrasphinx:index
rake ultrasphinx:daemon:start
* remember to restart app server

Search Controller
@query = params[:query] || “”'
@filters = params[:filters] || '””
@page = params[:page] || 1
@search = Ultrasphinx::Search.new(:query => @query+" "+@filters, :facets => ["category", "brand", "celebration"], :page => @page, :class_names => 'Product')
@search.run
@products = @search.results

Output

References
UltraSphinx
http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/doc/fauna/ultrasphinx
Sphinx
http://sphinxsearch.com/

Thanks a lot
:-)

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Facet Searching using Ultrasphinx

by Akhil Bansal

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