
Sphinx Search at Craigslist - tortilla
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010869.html
======
sachinag
We were turned on to Sphinx by smock over at Octopart. It enabled us to do our
awesome drill down screens at Dawdle that set us apart from our online
marketplace competitors:
[http://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Platform=Nintendo_DS/Vi...](http://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Platform=Nintendo_DS/Video_Games=1/Systems=1/Accessories=1/Price=LessThan25/SellerRating=4)
(No one else lets you screen by seller rating or price from the get go; only
from the product pages themselves.)

It would be really neat to have a favored list of packages like this used by
HN denizens. We used to use SWISH-E. Ugh.

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mattdennewitz
sphinx is easily my go-to tool for fulltext indexing of any sizable data set.
it:

    
    
      * is *really* fast 
      * has excellent bindings (i use django-sphinx)
      * is *extremely easy* to configure, and very flexible in its configuration
      * fast indexing times
      * excellent searching modes and search quality
      * geoanchoring, including distance to/from point in results
    

the only thing i wish it had is fuzzy matching, but its wordforms support
makes up for some of that.

~~~
mattdennewitz
fwiw, i found sphinx when looking to replace a client's _awful_ half-arsed
search implementation (over 10 years of data, with 30-50 new items being added
daily), for someone who has only very seldom futzed w/ java, it was much
easier and sane to audition sphinx first, instead of lucene or solr. i'd still
love to take solr for a test drive, but sphinx has covered all my needs so
far.

------
thorax
I'm a huge fan of Sphinx search-- we use a custom version of that to power
<http://bug.gd> and it's quite robust.

One of the greatest things going for it is the performance of reindexing--
it's really solid.

------
comatose_kid
How well does Sphinx work for real time updating? Does anyone know how it
compares to say postgresql + tsearch2?

~~~
thorax
It depends on your queryset, but the incremental (and even the full) indexing
is very fast. There are some benchmarks against lucene out there (e.g.
<http://ri.ms/pts> ), but none that I've found against tsearch2.

