[Mediawiki-l] Best full-text search engine?

[Samuel Lampa]

Jim Hu wrote:
> As I understand it, Lucene indexes and stores the indexes into a set  
> of index files that are kept in memory or are swapped in as needed and  
> does not use the backend database that's running the wiki.  By  
> contrast, Sphinx works via mySQL.  
Regarding indexes, Sphinx can be set up to use either a MySQL backend or 
it's own data format, which is the standard mode. It might be though 
that the SphinxSearch extension ( 
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SphinxSearch ) uses the wiki's 
database to get the article extracts for the search page, since these 
extracts are not in the indexes.

I have, btw, been impressed by Sphinx's indexing speed (something like 
1000 pages / 6 sec) , as well as it's set of features and config options 
(mutli-language stemming et.c.), and think it looks very promising.

Regards
Samuel