Search Smart Search Sphinx Smart!

Any other major forum operators uses Sphinx Search here?

It's powering Elliquiy right now, and I couldn't be happier with it. It will be powering Blue Moon before long as phpBB's searches and keyword insertions are currently responsible for most of my non-reindexing slow queries.

The index size is a bit smaller than SMF's hashed inverted index - but larger than MySQL's native fulltext index. It's still hashed, and since it runs an actual search engine daemon, with none of MySQL's cruft, it's faster than SMF's and you can forget about fulltext trying to compete. It also supports stemming, delta indexes, and you can even weight the results according to your preferences. Also, personally, I find FULLTEXT's stopword filter to be annoying. : )

Go ahead! Search for 'at' on Elliquiy.

 

I wish there was a way to integrate this into vBulletin. Maybe Wayne can chime in there.

 

There appears to be a mod here:

Sphinx Search - vBulletin.org Forum

However, from my reading it doesn't look like it takes significant advantage of Sphinx's abilities. It's a search engine, mind, a dedicated piece of software that powers searches. You design the indexing and selection queries yourself : )

 

Official support?

Would like to say it will be in 4.1 but can't. Don't know what specific features are being included. I guess it would depend on how the new search in vBulletin 4 works out as it has only been tested on databases with 30 million posts so far.

I've seen demonstrations of it in use on vBulletin sites though. There is the addon at vBulletin.org but I personally haven't used it. There is also another by Teck (Floren) but he will charge you $2000.00 (and yes the decimal is in the right place) for it.

 

Do you know of a site that he has implemented it on? I'd like to try it out.

 

AVS Forum

Demo:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkVHcqfEBQ"]YouTube - A demo of the new Sphinx Search 2 for vBulletin at AVForums[/ame]

 

"The free solution is only updated every day-"

I should note that it's fairly trivial to add a delta index - you just define an additional source and set a cron run to recompile it every x minutes (I recompile it every 15 on Elliquiy), which gets recompiled into the main index every morning. It's your .conf file that manages multiple indexes (you can even set up an hourly and minutely delta if you want).