If you're going to look at Sphinx, you'd do yourself a disservice by not also looking at Solr. Solr has effectively the same feature set, including geospatial

If you're going to look at Sphinx, you'd do yourself a disservice by not also looking at Solr. Solr has effectively the same feature set, including geospatial and multilingual searching, but it has better relevance, and generally is faster at returning query results (although Sphinx is faster at doing full reindexes). Also, unlike Sphinx, Solr doesn't glue you to MySQL. Or to any SQL database; use it with Cassandra, Voldemort, text files, quantum storage in the galactic hive-mind, whatever. (edit: They've added PostgreSQL support, and raw XML support, since I last installed and tested Sphinx about a year ago) Plus, unlike Sphinx, you don't need to reindex when you add new records, because Solr can seamlessly merge indexes on-the-fly. I know I sound like a fanboy here, but I spent a lot of time evaluating the two of them for our product, and Sphinx just didn't fit the bill for a large number of reasons. It's a good solution if you just need fulltext indexing in a MySQL database, but if you want to move beyond that, have a look at Solr. http://beerpla.net/2009/09/03/comparison-between-solr-and-sphinx-search-servers-solr-vs-sphinx-fight/ http://beerpla.net/2009/09/03/comparison-between-solr-and-sp...