Sphinx in Action: Autocomplete

This is a post from a series of posts called “Sphinx in Action”. See the whole series by clicking here.

Autocomplete provides suggestions as the user is typing in the search field. Everyone knows how it works, this is the first thing we see when using Google:

Many people like this and want it in their applications and Sphinx can be used to activate this functionality.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sphinx in Action: It all starts with indexing

This is a post from a series of posts called “Sphinx in Action”. See the whole series by clicking here.

Sphinx usage in any project usually starts with building the Sphinx configuration and indexing your data. In this article I’m going to point out some cool things that Sphinx provides regarding the configuration and how your data is indexed:

• First, I have to say that it supports inheritance. This is very useful because you can define things (like the connection to your database) only once and they will be reused for all the other sources, here’s an example:
  Read the rest of this entry »

Sphinx in Action: Did you mean … ?

This is a post from a series of posts called “Sphinx in Action”. See the whole series by clicking here.

Many of our customers want to incorporate “did you mean … ?” functionality into their applications. How it works is that when a typo is made in the query, a corrected version of the typo is suggested:

This can be done using a special technique with Sphinx that has been successfully used in many different projects.

There’s a demo of this technique in misc/suggest/ dir in the Sphinx source and an article (in Russian) where Andrew Aksyonoff describes the main idea behind this. The following is based on his original idea: Read the rest of this entry »

Sphinx in Action: Good and bad in Sphinx real time indexes

This is a post from a series of posts called “Sphinx in Action”. See the whole series by clicking here.

Sphinx has supported real time indexes since version 1.10 was released. Ever since, they have been getting more stable and robust, and now it is ready for use in production. Many people like this because it’s really simple to understand (i.e. no indexing, crontasks, main + delta schemes, and so on), but anyone who wants to use them should also be aware of the drawbacks of this when comparing it to traditional monolithic indexes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Meet Ivinco at Sphinx Search Day 2012!

The Sphinx team has just announced The Sphinx Search Day, which will take place in Santa Clara, California on April 13 -  just after the MySQL Conference And Expo.

This is first Sphinx event in USA and a great opportunity for Sphinx users in US to get together and meet each other and the Sphinx team. As the organizers say:

The aim of the Sphinx Search Day 2012 is to provide a technical forum to educate those who are new to Sphinx and drive innovation for long-time users. The majority of the talks will be technical in nature and more importantly delivered by real-world users and Sphinx community members.

I am also very glad that Ivinco was invited to this event. In our talk we will share our experience in building Sphinx systems from small projects to multi-terabyte search engines.

This is a free event – if you are around the Silicon Valley in April – go ahead and register. We look forward to meeting you at the Sphinx Search Day!