Does Sphinx (or other third party) search engine work in my case or should I create my own?

Question

I am creating a search function of my classifieds on my website. Here is some of the criteria I need to meet:

• When searching for 'bmw 520' only matches where these two words come in exactly this order is returned. not matches for only 'bmw' or only '520'.

• When searching for 'bmw 330ci' results as the above will be returned, but, WITH AND WITHOUT the ci extension. There are a nr of extensions in cars as you all know (i, ci, si, fi etc).

• I want the 'minus sign' to 'exclude' all returns containing the word after the sign, ex: 'bmw -330' will return all 'bmw' results without the '330' ones. (a NOT instead of minus sign is also ok)

• all special character accents like 'é' are converted to their simple values, in this case 'e'.

• list of words to ignore completely in the search string.

Would I need Sphinx or should I write this in a php file?

What do you suggest I do?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think that Sphinx matches all of your criteria.

Answer 2

I think Sphinx is pretty good match to what you want to do, but some things won't happen automatically...

• To match on two words together exactly, you either need to use the phrase match mode, or group the words in double-quotes while using the extended match mode.

• This is the tricky one - unless you specify specific exceptions, I don't think you can index 330ci as both '330 ci' and '330ci'.

• As long as you're using boolean or extended match modes, then the minus sign works as you'd like.

• 'Special' characters can be converted to standard ASCII, but this doesn't happen by default. You need to set up your charset_table value. This blog post is aimed at Thinking Sphinx (a Ruby plugin for Sphinx), but the setting value is just passed straight through to Sphinx.

• You can only ignore specific words on a per-query basis if you've got at least one other word in the query (that is: "-foo" will fail for Sphinx, but "foo -bar" is fine). It's worth noting that you can choose to not index specific words.