# Sphinx features

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/sphinx-features/2060>\
**Category:** Sphinx & Full-Text Search\
**Created:** [September 28, 2006, 5:57am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/sphinx-features/2060 "2006-09-28T05:57:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Speeple](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Speeple](https://forums.percona.com/u/Speeple)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2006, 5:57am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/sphinx-features/2060/1 "2006-09-28T05:57:13Z")

</div>

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!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Speeple](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Speeple](https://forums.percona.com/u/Speeple)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2006, 10:20am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/sphinx-features/2060/2 "2006-09-28T10:20:13Z")

</div>

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.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Peter](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/peter/32/2_2.png) [@Peter](https://forums.percona.com/u/Peter)\
**Post date:** [October 9, 2006, 2:30am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/sphinx-features/2060/3 "2006-10-09T02:30:50Z")

</div>

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.