Sphinx Search: Beginner’s Guide

Sphinx is an open-source full-text search server, designed from the ground up with a focus on performance, relevance, and integration simplicity. With Sphinx, you can either batch index and search data stored in an SQL database, NoSQL storage, or just files quickly and easily — or index and search data on the fly, working with Sphinx pretty much as a database server.

Sphinx Search Beginner’s Guide serves as a guide to everything you need to know about running a Sphinx Search Engine. In today’s world, search is an integral part of any application and having a reliable search engine like Sphinx Search can be the difference between running a successful and unsuccessful business. What good is being on the Web if no one knows you are there? It is easy to build a proficient search engine with Sphinx Search Beginner’s Guide to hand.

This practical guide provides insight into one of the most popular open source search engines, Sphinx. You will learn how to set up Sphinx on your own server, with the basics of how a search engine works explained in brief. You will learn how to create an index using Sphinx and then perform a search on that index using the client API, as well as learning how to configure Sphinx to get the most out of it. You will also be shown how Sphinx gives quality search results by relevance ranking. The book will help a beginner in all possible ways to create both simple and complex search forms in their applications. It’s easy to use Sphinx Search engine, when you have the Sphinx Search Beginner’s Guide to hand.

What you will learn from this book :

• Install Sphinx on your system
• Create indexes in Sphinx by using Sphinx’s indexer utility
• Use the Sphinx API to issue search queries from your PHP applications
• Filter your search results using different attributes
• Create a functional application in PHP that will use the Sphinx search engine as the backend to serve search queries
• Use PHP to create an application that fetches different feeds and stores the feed item data in a Sphinx index
• Create an advanced search form that implements lots of filters, as well as a search form for geodistance searches
• Explore the different configuration options available in the Sphinx configuration file that tailor Sphinx according to your needs

Approach
This book is a step-by-step guide for an absolute beginner. It covers everything, from installing to configuring, to get you started quickly. It has numerous code examples that the reader can try on their own and learn while doing so. It has two full-fledged applications as examples that readers can follow. This book is specifically focused on the Search feature of web applications.

Who this book is written for
This book is for developers who are new to Sphinx Search. All code examples use PHP but the logic is same for any other web scripting languages as well.

Book Details

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (March, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184951254X
• ISBN-13: 978-1849512541