Build a custom search engine with PHP and Sphinx
Sphinx indexes your content, finds text fast, and provides useful search results.
If you use Google or any other search engine, you already are a user of full text searching: the capability to search for a word or group of words within many texts for the best matches for your query. Sphinx is a full text search engine for database content, which you can integrate with other applications. You can test it or use it with a command-line tool, but Sphinx is most useful as part of a Web site, not as a standalone utility.
Sphinx is a fast and capable full text search engine, particularly suited for database content. It runs its own daemon (which you compile) and does not have any web crawlers bundled. Features include high performance, good scalability and search quality, advanced sorting, filtering, and grouping.
Sphinx works in a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) context. Many content management system use MySQL for data and are coded in PHP, which make them a perfect fit for Sphinx. You can also run Sphinx on BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD), Solaris, and even Windows. For coders, Sphinx provides Ruby, Perl, and Python libraries, but no Java.
IBM: Build a custom search engine with PHP
Compare Sphinx with other search engines
Glad to see that others have discovered and are promoting Sphinx! It really is a great search engine and so incredibly easy to install, configure and use. In fact, I’ve written several posts about it myself: http://talentedmrjones.posterous.com/super-fast-fulltext-search-with-sphinx-and-ze
Richard Jones
April 16, 2010 at 4:12 am