What's your solution for free-text search and sort ?

Question

AFAIK,MySQL performs really bad at this,

what's your solution?

BTW,what's the solution of SO?

EDIT

Please pay attention that free-text search itself is pretty fast in MySQL,

but not the case when the result also needs to be sorted on an attribute!

Answer 1

SO uses the full-text search capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server, it's been mentioned several times in the podcast and on the blog (ex: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/11/sql-2008-full-text-search-problems/) In this blog entry, Jeff mentions possibly moving to Lucene.net in the future.

I'm currently evaluating Haystack and Solr for searching. in a couple of projects.

Answer 2

I think stack overflow uses SQL Server in the background with the built in fulltext search capabilities offered by the database. Oracle offers Oracle intermedia (Oracle 9i), later called Oracle Text, which is very well integrated and efficient. Postgresql offers a standard built-in module called tsearch2. I'm not sure about MySql, but looking at the other 3 databases I've mentioned, fulltext is something that is certainly complex and takes time to mature as a feature.

Answer 3

I recommend Sphinx Search : needs to be configured and some modifications to your code, but really worth it.

On a forum with 1+ million messages, a full-text search takes just a few milliseconds.

Answer 4

Apache SOLR (Lucene) is pretty capable.