Sphinx features

Polyglot Projects Sphinx & Full-Text Search
1

I’ve got a search application which, going off what I’ve read about Sphinx Vs. MySQL Full-text, would perform ALOT better using Sphinx.

Features I need:

  • Column weighting, e.g. title should carry more weight than body, MySQL fulltext allows me to do this by using 2 seperate full-text indexes. This is obviously very inefficient. Does sphinx support this?

  • Boolean queries

  • Scoring and order by relevance. In this application other variables are taken account in the search results, e.g. age, locations etc, all recieve a score and are used in conjuction to the score provided by MySQL full-text to create the final score which the results are ordered by. Would sphinx allow this?

Features I’d like:

  • CJK support (I see Sphinx supports unicode, not sure if it recognises CJK glyphs however [beggers can’t be chosers]).

Features I don’t need:

  • Real time indexing. As each new row is also placed in the full-text index in mysql it is inefficient… Search index “lag” in relation to database information isn’t a problem. (I like how sphinx works here… how you can run a query after indexing to flag rows, pretty neat!)

Any opinions on Sphinx would be much appreciated!

2

Ok,

It can weight for individual columns:

weights
weights for Sphinx index columns (example: weights=1,10,4)

Which is great, as currently in MySQL I have SEPERATE full-text indexes on columns I wish to weight differently, extremely inefficient.

Also supports boolean queries.

All I really need to know now if it returns a “relevancy score” like MySQL full-text does, so that I can use it in conjuction to other columns to order result sets.

3

Using search with sphinx you can specify how do you want results to be sorted. They can be sorted by relevance, by some particular column or few other ways.