What is Sphinx Search Engine?
Search engines have really changed the way we search for goods and services available around us. Search engines are nothing but a kind of huge database that has all the information you are looking for and to make it easier for you, all you need to do is just type in the right keyword and it will throw up the list of all web servers that has the information you are looking for which you can browse as per your convenience. Today, the importance of search engine has grown considerably as more and more websites are being developed every second and every website owner wants to make sure that their site is one of the top rank website on all the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
There are a variety of search engines available online like blog search engines, code search engines, domain specific search engines, human edited search engines, job search engines and Pay per click search engines. Each search engine has its own specify task of finding the information as requested by the visitors and provide them with the top results. However, recently sphinx search engine is also getting too much of attention so let us find out more about sphinx search engine.
Sphinx search engine is a full text search engine distributed under GPL version 2 commercial licenses for embedded use. Being a standalone search engine, it is faster and efficient than other search engines. Sphinx search engine is specially designed to integrate with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently, sphinx search engine supports MySQL and PostgreSQL via direct connection or using XML pipe mechanism. The inventors of sphinx search engine say that the name has been decoded from SQL Phrase Index and that sphinx search engine has received a lot of positive feedbacks worldwide.
The main reason behind the success of sphinx search engine is its list of unending features which have attracted people from around the world. Sphinx search engine has a high indexing speed and high search speed as well as it is a standalone search engine. It supports distributed searching and also supports MySQL natively. It supports phrase searching and phrase proximity ranking and different search modes like match phrase or match any. Sphinx search engine supports a large number of document fields and document groups. It also supports generic XML interface which simplifies custom integration and is a pure PHP search client.
When talking about the indexing in the sphinx search engine the idea is that you use this search engine to index some table or tables from your database and then allow the user to search those tables using the sphinx search engine in the background. The indexing procedure is determined by a configuration file that defines what files need to be access and read. On the other side, you can search the indexed texts in two ways, either by a provided standalone program or by coding your own search by using a standard provided APIs that would run in the background.
Resources
Download Sphinx Search engine
Sphinx documentation
Posted by James on 2009-11-01 in the category " tools "