In his contuning series looking at the features coming in the next release of the Laravel framework (v5.3) Matt Stauffer takes a closer look at Laravel Scout, a new package that makes integration of content searching simpler for Laravel applications.

Search tools ElasticSearch and Algolia have gained a lot of popularity in the Laravel community in the last few years as powerful tools for indexing and searching your data.

[...] If you take a look at my pull request or theirs [to add Algolia support for Laravel], you'll see that it's not a small task to integrate fulltext search into your site. Algolia has since released a free product called Algolia DocSearch that makes it easy to add an Algolia search widget to documentation pages. But for anything else, you're still stuck writing the integration yourself—that is, until now.

He then goes about introducing what Laravel Scout is and how it integrates directly with Eloquent to make it easier to search and index their contents. It's a separate package that needs to be pulled in via Composer, but then it's simple to integrate. He includes examples of querying the data, setting the queries to queue and a few special cases to watch out for in your own Scout use.

The Ibuildings techPortal ha sposted their latest episode in the DPC Radio podcast series - recordings of sessions from the Dutch PHP Conference earlier this year. This episode is a recording of a talk from Paul Matthews about "Searching with Solr".

With Google constantly pushing the customer expectations of searching, is it time to move away from our database full-text search in pursuit of a more targeted platform? Can implementing Solr offer more than an answer to a search? Implementing a search platform isn’t always suitable for all applications, but in this talk we’ll look at identifying the right search solution, choosing the best way to integrate it into our application and exploring all the benefits a search server can offer.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed. The slides for the presentation can be found here on SlideShare.