The Django search engine is still an under development project : django.contrib.search.

Meanwhile, there are various search engines that can be integrated into a Django site.

Whoosh: a Python search engine, sufficient for relatively small websites. It requires some digging through its Python source code which shouldn't be a problem. When looking for a delete_document function for example, you in fact end up finding another delete function name.

For higher performance search engine needs, we have to compare C++ search engines.

• Sphinx, which is popular due to its ROR integration
• Xapian, which has django integration (Djapian and xappy). It is planned for integration into django.contrib.search. It does not work with mod_python but does work with apache2 mod_wsgi.

On a performance comparison note, Xapian also seems to have faster search queries and slower indexing performance compared to Sphinx.