Is There Search Without Sphinx

Well, here we are going to mention some search engine alternatives which can be used in symfony. We were already writing about using of sphinx plugin.
As quick alternative you can always use the very simple method mentioned in symfony 1.0’s Askeet tutorial: How to build a search engine?

Recently I’ve read the following article Comparison Between Solr And Sphinx Search Servers (Solr Vs Sphinx – Fight!) and was pretty much surprised how many more features provides Solr compared to Sphinx. In fact, I’ve only heard about Apache Lucene until this post so it was important for me to dive into what else could I miss and as it turned out there are lot of interesting things in this area.

So first of all I’ve read great article about using of Solr with PHP Enterprise search with PHP and Apache Solr and the other related search technology Carrot2 Carrot2 is an Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine

One specific feature which I liked a lot in Solr is Faceted search. As it turned out this type of search can be implemented in Sphinx as well.

Also I’ve found another aside search faceted technologies which I liked and bookmarked:

WP plugin Scriblio
Flamenco Search Engine

And finally here is the cool blog about search and cooking 🙂 Cooking, coding and crisps. The author has developed PHP5 abstract library to work with different types of search engines (Solr, Lucene, etc) which is called Forage. Unfortunately, it does not look like it’s in active development as there are no commits since 2008.

Completely different area of search I’m going to write about soon is semantic search. All these abbreviations like RDF and SPARQL are getting more sense to me now so it’s coming 🙂