Using Thinking Sphinx with rails

Free open-source SQL full-text search engine An acronym for SQL Phrase Index Developed by Andrew Aksyonoff

database search
Using SQL directly: like "%text%"
impractical for large text fields.
no relevance ranking.
full text search
searches all words in every document against query.
moves processing load out of DB.
relvance ranking.
other advanced features.

2 step process
indexing
scan text and build a list of search terms.
searching
search into index to get refrences to data.

High indexing speed.
upto 10 MB/sec on modern CPUs.
High search speed.
avg query is under 0.1 sec on 2-4 GB text collections.
High scalability.
upto 100 GB text, upto 100M documents on a single CPU.
Supports distributed searching.
can be extended to multiple servers.

Supports phrase proximity ranking.
providing good relevance.
Supports stopwords.
exclude common words like – a, an, the, with, in
Supports different search modes
"match all", "match phrase" and "match any"
Supports relevance modification on the fly.
Key Sphinx features are its speed and phrase proximity ranking.

boardreader.com
Indexes over 2 billion documents, BoardReader forum search engine is the biggest Sphinx installation at present.
mininova.org
Mininova, popular BitTorrent search engine, serves 3-5 million searches daily.
thepiratebay.org
The Pirate Bay and (forthcoming) SuprNova moved to Sphinx recently.
netlog.com
NetLog, a large social network site with over 35 million registered users, uses Sphinx for pretty every kind of search imaginable - people, photo, blog, event, music, and video searches. 12 million daily queries against 100+ GB indexes are handled by just 2 quad-core search boxes.

Sphinx can be downloaded from http://www.sphinxsearch.com/
Its distribution contains the following programs:
indexer
utility to create fulltext indices
searchd
daemon to search through fulltext indices
search
test utility to query fulltext indices from command line
sphinxapi
set of API libraries for Ruby, Python, Perl, Java.

Configuration
settings for indexer and searchd
Indexes, Fields, Attributes.
Each index has a document id , some fields , and some attributes .
The id has to be unique , generally it’s the primary key.
The fields contain the text that is to be searched .
The attributes contain the data used for sorting , filtering and grouping .

thinking_sphinx
Pat Allan
also developed the underlying API for Sphinx, Riddle.
git://github.com/freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx.git
ultrasphinx
Evan Weaver
svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/fauna/ultrasphinx/trunk

Can be installed simply by
ruby scriptplugin install <path_to_plugin>
No need to write the sphinx configuration file, plugins take care of this.

field aliasing
indexes full_name, :as => :name
field merging
[first_name, last_name], :as => :name
field weighting
set_property :field_weights => {: last_name =>2, :first_name => 1}
User.search "aaa", :field_weights => { :first_name => 1, :last_name => 2}
index computed value
indexes "age > 15", :as => :minor

sorting (using attributes and fields)
:sortable => true
has created_at
User.search("user", :order => :first_name, :sort_mode => :desc)
User.search("user", :order => "created_at DESC")
filtering (using attributes and fields)
User.search :conditions => {:name => "aaa"}
User.search :with => {:age => 10}
User.search :without => {:age => 10}
add custom SQL conditions to index
where "first_name = 'aaa'"

drop-in compatibility with will_paginate
User.search "aaa", :page => (params[:page] || 1)
geodistance
has :latit
has :longit
set_property :latitude_attr => :latit, :longitude_attr => :longit
Address.search "pizza hut", :geo => [1.234, 4.567], :order => "@geodist asc"
delta index support
set_property :delta => true

searching across multiple models
indexes posts.name
indexes posts.comments.name
comprehensive rake tasks
rake ts:conf
rake ts:in
rake ts:start, restart, stop
multiple deployment environments
rake ts:config RAILS_ENV=production

one-to-one
user has_one blog
indexes blog.name
one-to-many
blog has_many posts
indexes posts.name
many-to-many (through)
posts has_many comments through records
comments has_many posts through records
indexes comments.name

deeply nested
blog has_many posts
posts has_many comments
indexes posts.comments.name
STI
User.search("user", :with => {:class_crc => Teacher.to_crc32})
polymorphic
user has_one phone
company has_one phone
indexes phone.name
where "callable_type = 'User'“

You can run the index task while Sphinx is running, and it’ll reload the indexes automatically.
As of version 0.9.9, your configuration will automatically be reloaded.
Keep in mind that if any keywords for Ruby methods - such as id or name - clash with your column names, you need to use the symbol version.
Sphinx connects to DB directly, so don’t expect that any of the model methods can be indexed.

You can extract commands for indexing and starting search daemon into scripts for fast access.
indexer --config config/development.sphinx.conf --all
searchd --config config/development.sphinx.conf
skip this warning
distributed index 'model_name' can not be directly indexed; skipping.

Almost has all thinking_sphinx features with some additional features:
excerpt highlighting
spellcheck fields*
faceting on text, date, and numeric fields*
*will be demonstrated in next presentation

sphinx
http://www.sphinxsearch.com/
ultrasphinx
http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/doc/fauna/ultrasphinx/files/README.html
thinking_sphinx
http://ts.freelancing-gods.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/thinking-sphinx/

http://www.slideshare.net	88
http://www.funonrails.com	65
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http://localhost:3000	1

Using Thinking Sphinx with rails

by Rishav Dixit

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