This book will serve as a guide to everything that you need to know about running a Sphinx Search Engine. In today's world, search is an integral part of any application; a reliable search engine like Sphinx Search can be the difference between running a successful and unsuccessful business. What good is being on the web if no one knows you are there? It's easy to build a proficient search engine, with Sphinx Search: Beginners Guide at hand.
Chapter 1, Setting Up Sphinx is an introduction to Sphinx. It guides the reader through the installation process for Sphinx on all major operating systems.
Chapter 2, Getting Started demonstrates some basic usage of Sphinx in order to test its installation. It also discusses full-text search and gives the reader an overview of Sphinx.
Chapter 3, Indexing teaches the reader how to create indexes. It introduces and explains the different types of datasources, and also discusses different types of attributes that can comprise an index.
Chapter 4, Searching teaches the reader how to use the Sphinx Client API to search indexes from within PHP applications. It shows the reader how to use the PHP implementation of the Sphinx Client API.
Chapter 5, Feed Search creates an application that fetches feed items and creates a Sphinx index. This index is then searched from a PHP application. It also introduces delta indexes and live index merging.
Chapter 6, Property Search creates a real world real estate portal where the user can add a property listing and specify different attributes for it so that you can search for properties based on specific criteria. Some advanced search techniques using a client API are discussed in this chapter.
Chapter 7, Sphinx Configuration discusses all commonly used configuration settings for Sphinx. It teaches the reader how to configure Sphinx in a distributed environment where indexes are kept on multiple machines.
Chapter 8, What Next? discusses some new features introduced in the recent Sphinx release. It also shows the reader how a Sphinx index can be searched using a MySQL client library. Lastly, it discusses the scenarios where Sphinx can be used and mentions some of the popular Web applications that are powered by a Sphinx search engine.