Alex Rivera | Logout

Choosing a stand-alone full-text search server: Sphinx or SOLR?

Asked 2009-08-16T11:25:14.433
191

I'm looking for a stand-alone full-text search server with the following properties:

  • Must operate as a stand-alone server that can serve search requests from multiple clients
  • Must be able to do "bulk indexing" by indexing the result of an SQL query: say "SELECT id, text_to_index FROM documents;"
  • Must be free software and must run on Linux with MySQL as the database
  • Must be fast (rules out MySQL's internal full-text search)

The alternatives I've found that have these properties are:

  • Solr (based on Lucene)
  • ElasticSearch (also based on Lucene)
  • Sphinx

My questions:

  • How do they compare?
  • Have I missed any alternatives?
  • I know that each use case is different, but are there certain cases where I would definitely not want to use a certain package?
mysql full-text-search lucene solr sphinx
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I have been using Sphinx for almost a year now, and it has been amazing. I can index 1.5 million documents in about a minute on my MacBook, and even quicker on the server. I am also using Sphinx to limit searches to places within specific latitudes & longitudes, and it is very fast. Also, how results are ranked is very tweakable. Easy to install & setup, if you read a tutorial or two. Almost 1.0 status, but their Release Candidates have been rock solid.

answered 2009-08-16T13:21:22.540

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