title: Lightweight Rails Search Engine
body: <p>I'm looking for a light weight search engine in rails. It's not meant to do a full text search or anything, I'm doing a simple autocomplete textbox. Basically, given a string, I need it to search two string columns in my table and return the results that are most relevant. </p>
  
  <p>I've thought about doing the search algorithm myself, using a lot of SQL LIKE statements and such, but it gets a bit messy when you talk about weighting entries and what happens if there's a word missing. Fuzzy Search would also be nice. I've tried to do some Googling but it mostly gave me things (I think) are overkill, like Sphinx.</p>
  
  <p>Do you have any suggestions for a simple search engine that can do what I've described? Or is making a custom engine always better.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <p>P.S. I thought it might be helpful to note that I'm auto completing book titles and authors, so the user has a pretty good idea of what they should put in the search field.</p>