Free open-source SQL full-text search engine

Main Latest news new! News archive new! About Features Downloads new! Mailing list Community Documentation new! Articles Presentations Contributed software new! Forum Bug tracker Wiki Contacts Commercial services Support and consulting Commercial licensing Misc Powered by Sphinx new! User stories Buttons  Subscribe in a reader

About Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2. Commercial license is also available for embedded use. Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes). As for the name, Sphinx is an acronym which is officially decoded as SQL Phrase Index. Yes, I know about CMU's Sphinx project. Distribution Sphinx distribution includes the following programs: indexer: an utility to create fulltext indices; search: a simple (test) utility to query fulltext indices from command line; searchd: a daemon to search through fulltext indices from external software (Web scripts using Sphinx API; or MySQL with SphinxSE; or your application server); sphinxapi: a set of API libraries for popular Web scripting languages (there are native API ports for PHP, Python, Java, Perl, and Ruby). History Sphinx development was started back in 2001, because I didn't manage to find an acceptable search solution (for a database driven web site) which would meet my requirements. Actually, each and every important aspect was a problem: search quality (ie. good relevance) statistical ranking methods, performed rather bad, especially on large collections of small documents (forums, blogs, etc) search speed especially if searching for phrases which contain stopwords, as in "to be or not to be" moderate disk and CPU requirements when indexing important in shared hosting enivronment, not to mention the indexing speed. Despite the amount of time passed and numerous improvements made in the other solutions, there's still no solution which I personally would be eager to migrate to. Adding that with a lot of positive feedback received from Sphinx users during last years, the obvious decision is to continue developing Sphinx (and, eventually, to take the world).