Sphinx - a free open-source SQL full-text search engine

Sphinx: Search Outside the Box | Linux Magazine

For many years, the only easy way to add decent search capability to a MySQL-backed web site was to use its full-text index support. It was fast, efficient, and reasonably configurable. But as more and more sites began to deal with larger datasets and moved from MyISAM to InnoDB, they found that it was harder to support their search needs. InnoDB does not provide full-text indexing, so that often meant keeping around a set of slaves that still ran MyISAM for the sole purpose of handling full-text search requests.

Sphinx is a powerful, free full-text search engine that works extremely well with MySQL.

Sphinx was a project born out of the need for something better than MySQL’s full-text search for sites already using MySQL. It’s available both as a MySQL storage engine and as a stand-alone daemon. There are pros and cons to both deployment methods, but I’m going to focus mainly on the stand-alone daemon for this article. Not only is it what I’m most familiar with, I believe it to be far more powerful and flexible.

A related article: Build a custom search engine with PHP