5 ms·

Sphinx Search at Craigslist

25 points by tortilla 18y ago

mattdennewitz 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
I'm a huge fan of Sphinx search-- we use a custom version of that to power http://bug.gd 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.
sachinag 18y ago
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/Video_Games=1/Systems=1/Accessories=1/Price=LessThan25/SellerRating=4 http://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Platform=Nintendo_DS/Vi... (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.
comatose_kid 18y ago
How well does Sphinx work for real time updating? Does anyone know how it compares to say postgresql + tsearch2?
- thorax 18y ago
  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 http://ri.ms/pts ), but none that I've found against tsearch2.

25 points by tortilla 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago

I'm a huge fan of Sphinx search-- we use a custom version of that to power http://bug.gd 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.

sachinag 18y ago

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/Video_Games=1/Systems=1/Accessories=1/Price=LessThan25/SellerRating=4 http://www.dawdle.com/search.php/1/1/Platform=Nintendo_DS/Vi... (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.

comatose_kid 18y ago

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

thorax 18y ago
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 http://ri.ms/pts ), but none that I've found against tsearch2.