[kontrabass]

Well I've finally got this up and going. Install went well, thanks to all the input here. Took me a while to figure out why a search term with thousands of matches returned only 180 vbulletin threads (1000 post matches gets distilled down into the 180 threads that hold them!). So I upped the max results to 2000 and get satisfactory result sets.

I was disappointed with not being able to do "phrase matches" - until I changed this line in sphinx.php:

$cl->SetMatchMode ( SPH_MATCH_ALL );

to

$cl->SetMatchMode ( SPH_MATCH_EXTENDED );

Extended mode enables all this stuff (including "phrase matching") :

http://www.sphinxsearch.com/doc.html#extended-syntax

(sorry if this is repeated)

However it seems that unless you can teach your users to use pipes and ampersands, "AND" and "OR" text boolean operators will not work

Edit: Actually, even pipes and apmersands don't work I guess ("The search term you specified (|) is under the minimum word length (3) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer."). Lol

Is everyone using this search doing ok without any boolean operators? Every search is treated as an "AND" search I guess.