Is there a pure Python Lucene?

Question

The ruby folks have Ferret. Someone know of any similar initiative for Python? We're using PyLucene at current, but I'd like to investigate moving to pure Python searching.

Answer 1

For some applications pure Python is overrated. Take a look at Xapian.

Answer 2

The only one pure-python (not involving even C extension) search solution I know of is Nucular. It's slow (much slower than PyLucene) and unstable yet.

We moved from PyLucene-based home baked search and indexing to Solr but YMMV.

Answer 3

After weeks of searching for this, I found a nice Python solution: repoze.catalog. It's not strictly Python-only because it uses ZODB for storage, but it seems a better dependency to me than something like SOLR.

Answer 4

Whoosh is a new project which is similar to lucene, but is pure python.

Answer 5

For non-pure Python, Sphinx Search with Python API works the fastest. From the benchmarks from multiple blogs, Sphinx Search is way faster than Lucene, uses way less memory and it is in C.

I am developing a multi-document search engine based on it, using python and web2py as framework.

Answer 6

I recently found pyndexter. It provides abstract interface to various different backend full-text search engines/indexers. And it ships with a default pure-python implementation.

These things can be disastrously slow though in Python.