On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:52:05 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote: > Googling lead to a tool called Sphinx that apparently is coupled with a > data base tool like mysql. It is advertised as the kind of search tool > I'm after and has a perl front-end also available in portage > (dev-perl/Sphinx-Search). > > The call it a `full text search engine', but never really say what that > means.
It means that you can dump a lot of text "documents" into it (based on html pages, database records, actual documents, etc). sphinx efficiently indexes all the text in it, and then allows you to retrieve it again, supporting things that are useful for searching in text such as stemming. It can use MySQL but this isn't needed to use it. It should be able to help you with the task you want to solve, although I'm not familiar with the capabilities of the Sphinx-Search front-end/ binding. Kind regards, Hans
