Whoosh

Whoosh

Whoosh is an open source search library for Python that allows indexing and searching text documents. It is fast, easy to use, and suitable for small to medium sized websites and applications.
Whoosh image
python indexing search

Whoosh: Open Source Search Library for Python

An open source search library for Python that allows indexing and searching text documents, fast and easy to use for small to medium sized websites and applications

What is Whoosh?

Whoosh is an open source search library written in pure Python. It allows you to easily add full-text search functionality to your Python applications and websites.

Some key features of Whoosh:

  • Fast, pure Python implementation
  • Supports ranked searching, hit highlighting, spelling correction, faceting
  • Works on Python 2.7+ and 3.5+
  • Easy to install and use with a simple, clean API
  • Scales well from small to medium sites and data sets
  • Fully documented and has an active community behind it

Whoosh is a good choice if you need full text search for a small to medium sized site or application that is written in Python. It balances simplicity and ease of use with high performance searching capabilities. The pure Python code base makes it very portable as well.

Whoosh Features

Features

  1. Full-text indexing and searching
  2. Support for multiple document formats (plain text, HTML, XML, etc)
  3. RAM-based indexes for faster searches
  4. Ranking models for relevancy sorting
  5. Highlighting of search terms in results
  6. Spell checking of queries
  7. Stemming and stop word filtering

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Very fast compared to other Python search options

Intuitive and easy to use API

Actively maintained and improved

Good documentation

RAM indexes provide fast indexing and search speeds

Lightweight and suitable for small to medium sites/apps

Cons

Less scalable than search servers like Elasticsearch

Less advanced features than enterprise search engines

Not ideal for large scale or high throughput sites

No distributed/cloud capability out of the box

No advanced analytics or reporting


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