Sphinx Search

[eoc_Jason]

Originally Posted by Jah-Hools

See - at 2 million posts search speed isnt a problem for me (so far) - what IS a problem is the forum members deep, deep unhappiness with the way the VB search works.. Google is the best way to search my forum (it handles 2 character content way better) so I am about to pull the trigger on Google Custom Business edition.. I wanted to make a last check to see if Sphinx would do the job better.. But all I can glean from these posts is 'use sphinx if VB search is slow' I don't see any raves about improved user functionality.. Does Sphinx simply improve speed for big forums and reduce the extra machines in a cluster of servers?

Its search functionality I am after.. Does Sphinx add functionality to the forum users experience - or just add speed?

One big problem with the stock vB code is that it likes to do a lot of post-filtering of the returned results. It happened way too often (to me and others) that searches where I know a keyword should appear (because I put the word in a specific place to do the test) vB will return "No results found" because it drops the score so low that it rejects it, even if it was the ONLY result...

Sphinx has it's own scoring system, and depending on how you set it up it can be extremely powerful. But if you want to gain the full benefit you will also need to probably peel through the search.php file and rip out some of the vB scoring so that it doesn't remove relevant results.

Also with sphinx it will return results in the same thread (or post) like view. So having results returned by date or a certain user or whatever is a lot more powerful than what google could probably do.