I put together some benchmarks for the three main Rails fulltext search solutions: Sphinx/Ultrasphinx, Ferret/acts_as_ferret, and Solr/acts_as_solr. The book Advanced Rails Recipes was a big help in getting Ferret and Solr running quickly. dataset The dataset is the entire KJV Bible, indexed by verse and also by book. This gives us 31,102 smallish records and 66 large ones. Ferret and Solr both us