Searching, sorting, and filtering in Rails controllers can be a pain. ElasticSearch and Solr are great, high-powered solutions, but are really big dependencies for a small app. Luckily, Rails includes scopes, which can provide you with a lot of what you need for simple searching, filtering, and sorting. If you take advantage of scope chaining, you can build the features you want without taking on big dependencies or writing a bunch of repetitive search code yourself.