(Updated) Google unveils full-text search on the App Engine

The Google IO session I was looking forward to the most was definitely the one on full-text search (FTS). When I found out half a year ago that I’d have to write my own FTS engine in order to search through my data in a reasonable way, it felt ironic. Today, the search engine giant announced their own FTS implementation, filling a ‘hole’ in de GAE SDK by finally offering a sophisticated way of searching on the Google App Engine.

The session was held just a few hours ago and as I’m not at Google IO, I was unable to hear about it at first hand. My growing curiosity made me to search through Twitter, looking for developers that would tweet about it. I decided to write my findings down, for you interested folks out there. What we know so far:

• FTS runs on the megastore (what is the megastore?).
• It supports geopoints, atoms and HTML.
• Results can be ordered by hit count, relevance, fields or a custom metric.
• It supports cursors, so you can easily load more results to fill a second page of search results.
• It can return up to three snippets (each of 160 characters max) containing the matching content.
• FTS documents can be generated automatically from datastore entities.
• It has configurable consistency, either live or eventually.
• FTS documents are versioned and its indexes are hot swappable.

(Sources: johnwlockwoodiv, mmastrac and __tosh)

If you have anything else to share, please leave a comment.

Update: The full Google IO session is now available on youtube! (Thanks Jakub Bednář)