For those of you using Rails on PostgreSQL 8.3+, you might be interested in using PGSQL's integrated full-text-search capabilities with this plugin, although it's not yet release quality:

http://code.google.com/p/acts-as-tsearch/

Acts_as_ferret works okay, but when you run into a lot of writes (the problem the poster had), you have to run it with its built in DRb server to resolve the issues.

DRb? Ouch... another layer of complexity :( How difficult is it to run DRb over a few VPS'?

Never tried it, but it doesn't work so well on a shared host lol :)

I'm frustrated with ferret, sphinx and so on..so I needed something functional..and this one works great! Well done Michele..thanks!