Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

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STENA
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Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

Post by STENA »

I wish to have a more intelligent search function on my forum. I want to be able to search for parts of words, shorter or longer and skip, for example, the last three letters like "cold" "colder" "coldest" and instead get results like "cold" when searching for "coldest" etc.

Is this possible with, for example, the Sphinx extension?
Sphinx offers full text search, but what exactly does this mean? Any experiences, please.

What more advanced search options can sphinx convince me to use instead of what the standard version of phpbb already offers? Are there even better competitors to Sphinx in the search functionality area that are compatible with phpbbforums?
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Le_Spirit
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Re: Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

Post by Le_Spirit »

No time to answer to all the above questions and/or elaborate that much,sorry, but I can tell you that on a board with over 500'000 posts by over 140'000 members, once setup, Sphinx is really worth the time invested in installing it (documentation is a bit sparce).

Yes, of course you can use jokers like you asked, for ex cold* will find all occurences of word containing the beginning "cold... " have a look at the sphinx documentation for more elaborate searches.

To my sysadmin but also user eyes, the most important advantage with Sphinx is it's incredible speed, results almost pop up instantly and that is priceless comfort for the users.
ezlynx
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Re: Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

Post by ezlynx »

Sphinx 3.3.1 was released July 2020.
https://sphinxsearch.com/blog/2020/07/0 ... -released/

In the phpbb documentation, I see this as a minimum requirement for using Sphinx:
Sphinx Search server >2.0.1 && <3.0
https://download.phpbb.com/pub/document ... tation.pdf

Anyone know if the newest version will work okay with an uptodate phpbb? I haven't been able to track this down on the forums.
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P_I
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Re: Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

Post by P_I »

Sphinx search is an awesome search backend. The challenge is it requires installing and running the sphinx daemon, which generally cannot be done on shared hosting plans.

As to the specific version question, look for guidance on the Sphinx Downloads | Open Source Search Server page
Sphinx "open source" wrote: 3.0 and up sources are currently only available under a delayed FOSS or commercial licenses for several reasons; going back to regular plain old GPL is planned but timing is moot; so email us if you require the sources immediately.

Sources for previous 2.x versions can be found either in the Archive below or on GitHub, github.com/sphinxsearch/sphinx
From some previous research notes an alternative might be About Manticore Search
Manticore Search wrote:Manticore Search is an open-source database that was created in 2017 as a continuation of Sphinx Search engine. We took all the best from it, significantly improved its functionality, fixed hundreds of bugs, rewrote the code almost completely and kept it open-source! That all has made Manticore Search a modern, fast, light-weight and full-featured database with outstanding full-text search capabilities.
Clearly there is some backstory involved. I have no clue on the details although there are many clues in the blog post Jul 24, 2017. Sphinx 2017.
Normal people… believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet. – Scott Adams
ezlynx
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Re: Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

Post by ezlynx »

Thanks for the info on the Sphinx versions.

Stats on my old board (running since 2002) - Total posts 2,268,332 • Total topics 75,738 • Total members 14,676

I recently moved from Centos to Almalinux 8 (a nice shiny small vps - not shared hosting). The search tables were corrupted (though they functioned fine on the old vps) so I deleted them in hopes they could be rebuilt. Given the praise Sphinx gets, I was going to try muddling through installing it and try to get it working.

After the move, the native search was re-enabled, I don't recall the option to get it to reindex the existing posts/topics. Only new posts. So I need a solution that will make the whole board searchable again.

Given my limited skills, unsure I could get Manticore running. The detailed Sphinx installation instructions in the phpbb 3.3 documentation look promising.
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warmweer
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Re: Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

Post by warmweer »

ezlynx wrote: Sat Jan 21, 2023 1:30 am After the move, the native search was re-enabled, I don't recall the option to get it to reindex the existing posts/topics. Only new posts. So I need a solution that will make the whole board searchable again.
...
Delete the index and then recreate it.
With 2 million posts that will take some time.
You might want to do that on a local copy and then import the search tables.
ezlynx
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Re: Sphinx experiences - how much better than default search?

Post by ezlynx »

Just a quick note to say my daughter's boyfriend installed this for me. The available version to install via yum was 2.2.11-15.el8. Hiccups were a failure to connect due to mysql's password (I had used a # which needed to be escaped for Sphinx), installation of mariadb-connector-c, and changing ownership of the files to Sphinx from root.
Some other manipulations to get it to work but it does seem functional and very zippy!

I run CSF and added user:sphinx to the csf.pignore file to stop its sending "excessive resource usage" emails.
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