

Why MySQL fulltext search WAS good enough - pornark
http://blog.pornark.com/introducing-new-pornark-search-system-why-mys

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rick888
The problem with Mysql fulltext is that you are required to use the MyISAM
table type.

If you are doing any writes to this table, you will eventually run into
corruption problems. This is because of the way it works underneath. So, I
only use it with static data or data that I rarely update.

I wish Innodb had fulltext search capabilities. I don't like the idea of
adding yet another 3rd party server in the mix.

~~~
kennu
You should use the right tool for the job. Sphinx is a very functional search
product, is available as a Ubuntu package and is easy to integrate to e.g.
Django data models.

(The article links to some weird page in <http://www.sphinxsearch.org/>. The
right link is <http://sphinxsearch.com/.>)

~~~
regularfry
Sometimes you just _can't_. One of my first projects as a freelancer involved
hacking full-text search onto a niche news site hosted on a shared host with a
shared MySQL instance (specced before my time, and not something I could
change).

Sphinx wasn't available, Lucene _certainly_ wasn't an option, and the
immutable MySQL fulltext config wouldn't let words of 3 letters or less be
indexed. However, that wasn't good enough, because there were a _lot_ of
important 3-letter company names in the niche.

So, what did I do? I prepended 'zzz' to every word before it went into the
fulltext index. Dirty, hacky, inefficient, and let me deliver working
functionality the same day the request came in.

