This is more tribute to Ruby than Ruby on Rails. I was developing a complex app in ROR. This app needed vertical and horizontal search to be done at the same time. For horizontal search Advanced Rails Recipes book aided us. There was a recipe to do dirty search and we implemented it. For vertical search we used set operations of Ruby programming language to find perfect match. For this mu own ruby book I love Ruby was referred.

The result was a search engine that did not try to throw out results for almost every query, but it tried to give out matches that was very accurate.  We haven’t test it yet in the real world,but rather than throwing out too many results, I think it will give the right one.

My next step is to build a recommendation engine so that users will get suggestions as they are searching. Lets see how it goes. The reason why I am writing this blog is, if I has done it with PHP, it would have taken eons. Instead I am doing it Ruby. My developer takes the same time as it would take to do it in PHP, but he is doing it in a relaxed manner.

My advice to many PHP companies is, invest on your employees to study Ruby on Rails. Its not easy to learn it, its difficult, but once learned, your developers will rock in creating webapps. Its true, I found it myself after I kicked Rails myself. What a huge mistake that was at that time.