I never liked how build in WordPress search works. it shows full documents rather than snippets it does not search comments and it does not have any query language so I always used Google search if I wanted to find something on MySQL Performance Blog.
Today we have published new search functionality for our site which is based on Sphinx. We have developed it as WordPress plugin which will be available as open source software in a few weeks – just want to test it a bit more and write proper documentation before announcing. If you would like to test it however let us know.
As you can see search functionality allows you to specify what would you like to search (Posts, Pages or Comments) as well as if you would like to sort results be relevance of freshness. You can also use query standard Sphinx query language to search phrases or Search MyISAM in post title.
Besides basic search functionality we’ve implemented list of last searches and Top searches which if both nice for fun and for SEO.
Hope this addition will make MySQL Performance Blog more useful for you.
UPDATE: For those looking to download plugin code it is here:
https://launchpad.net/wp-sphinx-plugin/+download
Can the Sphinx plugin work on WordPress-MU?
Great to see you using Sphinx. I always used google to search your site too, but it was never that convenient
Even,
I do not know about WordPress-MU it likely would need some work.
Hi guys,
I’m experiencing some performance issues with full-text indexes on MySQL, and I’m actually studying Sphinx as an alternative. On some tests I’ve done, I see a good performance, but was wondering ifyou could share some benchmarks comparing the two systems on your case. It would help me a lot to sell this change internally 😉
Wow that’s great.
I’ve heard that you have to use cronjob to make its indexes update periodically.
Is there any search engine support that for realtime indexes ? That would be great.
Sphinx WP plugin sounds great. Usually all WP plugins works with WP-MU, but I don’t know how your plugin works. In WP-MU, tables are numbered, for example wp_1_posts, wp_2_posts etc. I believe you would just have to configure Sphinx index for each blog in Sphinx config and that is it.
@samule Yes, there is a Lucene search engine but Sphinx is really great once you set it up right, with all updates etc.
Right it uses cron to update indexes which is good enough for the task.
Sphinx will support real time updates in the future. It just takes a time to implement it without performance sacrifices.
Nice work, team!
Paolo,
Please check presentation page. It has full text search benchmarks for Sphinx/Lucene/MySQL FT. Though all of them are somethat improved and we need to redo them the general idea stays the same.
Thanks Peter… Sorry, I hadn’t noticed the link before.
I’m a new fan of the blog 😉
Keep up with the good work.
Ein wirklich sehr Interessante Seite mit guten Informationen.
Test for fulltext search with Sphinx : Äịt con mẹ…Không biết Sphinx có tìm kiếm được cái nà y không nhỉ ?
Can’t search with keyword : “Äịt”
Thanh,
Thank you. I will check how our encoding tables are set up. For this blog we were mainly looking for english search.
Hi Peter
I hope Sphinx can support Unicode and Vietnamese.
“Äịt con mẹ” -> Vietnamese
The new search is nice to use. I especially like the phrase proximity relevance, so I see “group commit” results before results that have both “group” and “commit” somewhere in them. :o)
Thanks Baron, Yes phrase proximity really helps with ranking in many cases.
Group commit is a good example as both GROUP and COMMIT are frequent terms in SQL scripts 🙂
We just updated sphinx tables now to be unicode and now Äịt con mẹ is searchable whatever than means 🙂
Tks Peter,
Good job.
peter,
“Äịt con mẹ” mean “Fuck You” in Vietnamese
I mistake,
It mean “Fuck your mother”
Vietnamese very uncultivated!
test for “Ä”.No fuk.
Tks Peter.
My English not so good but thank for lovely site with information I looking for and need also.
Sphinx is a wonderful full text engine and I recommend anyone wanting great flexibility and performance for full text searches to check it out! I am happy to hear about the WordPress plugin. Great blog BTW!
Is the plugin available yet?
Evan,
It is coming if you’re interested I can hook you up with developer for beta testing.
I’d like that, although I need it for WordPress-MU in an integrated environment with another site, so I’m not sure that I can give much useful feedback for the standard case.
It is likely to be little bit complicated for me to implement. Is there any simple thing other thank Sphinx? But It is worth to try.
Hey, I’d like to know how you have handled the very recent post in the index. Are they directly available for search ?
thanks,
pierre-yves
Hi, This sounds great. I’ve wanted to fix my wordpress search for awhile now. Can I check out the beta version of the Sphinx plugin? I’d love to play around with it on my local instance.
nice work , very interesting 🙂 thanks
Is your WordPress search plugin available for use by the general public? If so, where can it be downloaded?
I think is nice site keep it on , very good
Thank you, friends, for your sharing your ideas
Great site! Best wishes!
great idea I was looking for this solution,where I sign for beta test?
This have been already released? I can’t find it neither on this blog neither on wordpress pluguins list… If it haven’t been released can I beta test it? I would be glad of it 🙂
Jordi
Where can I download the WordPress plugin?
Still not published. I passed your comment to developer so he might send you distribution as we have it now.
Hi,
I’m also very interested in this project. Is it possible to have a distribution of this engine ?
Thanks
Hi,
I would be very interested into beta testing it as well,
Thanks!
Any new Status for the WordPress Plugin? Any chances to get in contact with the original author?
Walter
It is here:
https://launchpad.net/wp-sphinx-plugin/+download
Hi there,
This is exactly what I have been searching for 🙂 I downloaded the plugin and uploaded to my WordPress 2.7 site. Unfortunately I got the error below when trying to activate
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/dubaijob/public_html/dev/wp-content/plugins/wp-sphinx-plugin-1.0.tar.gz on line 45
Can anyone help at all, please?
Thanks
Kash
This plugin works with wordpress 2.9?
Thanks
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Thanks Peter – a lot of our work covers search so something like this will be really usefull.
How did the beta testing go?
Any update on how the beta testing went