I'm a beginning programmer in Ruby on Rails 3. I currently want to implement a simple nfull-text search engine on a website which will search the site itself for whatever you enter in. The back end of the site is a bit complicated for security reasons (the models don't have direct access to the database, they call these coded web services any time they need something from the database) so I'm not sure if I can use any of the plugins out there for search engines on Rails. I've also never attempted to do anything with search before.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I should go about this? Or are there any resources out there for search that would be useful for what I want to achieve?
You can use Solr. There's a good gem sunspot that adds a nice dsl to solr. There is also another full text engine, ElasticSearch, with the tire gem