Hello. I was about to integrate the Sphinx-based search into the website, but I've found that there's no built support for spelling correction.
Folks on the web suggest using pspell or other third-party libraries to get things done, but the problem is the data I'm going to search in, contains mostly "technical" terms like brand names, thus I don't think common libraries will include them.
On the other hand, Xapian states to have spelling correction support based on the data indexed, so exactly what I want. Is it worth using Xapian instead? I'm still quite confused of which fulltext search engine I should use: Sphinx seems to be quite good, but lacking some cool features of Xapian (or maybe Lucene?), while it looks like the latter has smaller community and less documentation.
I think I can solve the problem with words not present in pspell dictionary using the custom one for it, but I'm not sure whether that will impose noticeable performance losses? I'm going to use the search system for the spotlight search (separate search via ajax on every letter entered) on a pretty popular website, so performance matters.
Ideally, I'd like to make some fields like brand names have more priority over common dictionary but I guess that's not really important since most brand names a quite distinct from the other words.
Any suggestions on the general design of the custom full-text search engine are welcome too.
Thanks