Searchkick

:rocket: Search made easy

Searchkick provides sensible search defaults out of the box. It handles:

• stemming - tomatoes matches tomato
• special characters - jalapenos matches jalapeños
• extra whitespace - dishwasher matches dish washer
• misspellings - zuchini matches zucchini
• custom synonyms - qtip matches cotton swab

Runs on Elasticsearch

Battle-tested at Instacart

Usage

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  searchkick
end

And to query, use:

Product.search "2% Milk"

# or search specific fields
Product.search "Butter", fields: [:name, :brand]

Query Like SQL

Product.search "2% Milk", where: {in_stock: true}, limit: 10, offset: 50
# TODO not equal, greater than, less than, ranges, or operator

Facets

Product.search "2% Milk", facets: [:store_id, :aisle_id]

Synonyms

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  searchkick synonyms: [["scallion", "green onion"], ["qtip", "cotton swab"]]
end

You must call Product.reindex after changing synonyms.

Make Searches Better Over Time

Use analytics on search conversions to improve results.

Also, give popular documents a little boost.

Keep track of searches. The database works well for low volume, but feel free to use redis or another datastore.

class Search < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :product
  # fields: id, query, searched_at, converted_at, product_id
end

Add the conversions to the index.

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :searches

  searchkick conversions: true

  def to_indexed_json
    {
      name: name,
      conversions: searches.group("query").count.map{|query, count| {query: query, count: count} }, # TODO fix
      _boost: Math.log(orders_count) # boost more popular products a bit
    }
  end
end

After the reindex is complete (to prevent errors), tell the search query to use conversions.

Product.search "Fat Free Milk", conversions: true

Zero Downtime Changes

Product.reindex

Behind the scenes, this creates a new index products_20130714181054 and points the products alias to the new index when complete - an atomic operation :)

Searchkick uses find_in_batches to import documents. To filter documents or eagar load associations, use the searchkick_import scope.

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :searchkick_import, where(active: true).includes(:searches)
end

There is also a rake task.

rake searchkick:reindex CLASS=Product

Thanks to Jaroslav Kalistsuk for the original implementation.

Elasticsearch Gotchas

Inconsistent Scores

Due to the distributed nature of Elasticsearch, you can get incorrect results when the number of documents in the index is low. You can read more about it here. To fix this, set the search type to dfs_query_and_fetch. Alternatively, you can just use one shard with settings: {number_of_shards: 1}.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "searchkick"

And then execute:

bundle

TODO

• Test helpers - everyone should test their own search
• Built-in synonyms from WordNet
• Dashboard w/ real-time analytics?
• Suggest API "Did you mean?"
• Allow for "exact search" with quotes
• Make updates to old and new index while reindexing possibly with an another alias

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request