SphinxSearch

Introduction

This site uses Sphinx full-text search engine as a replacement for standard MediaWiki search. Our code is based on SphinxSearch extension by Paul Grinberg. The changes we made include:

Changed the overall model based on LuceneSearch extension to make Sphinx the main (and only) search engine on this wiki.

Added support for the Go button so user is redirected to an exact title match automatically.

Changed the main data fetch query for the indexer to make it somewhat faster. Added page_id attribute to the index to make fetching of search results faster as well.

Added an incremental index. We index entire wiki every night and update the incremental index with articles changed since then several times a day.

Tweaked handling of namespaces, so initial search uses namespaces from user's preferences.

Installation

To install our version of this extension, first download and install Sphinx.

Now create a sphinx.conf file. Sphinx comes with well-commented sample file, but if you want to use our code, you need to start with our sphinx.conf and modify it further if necessary:

You will need to update the file paths and table names (if you use some prefix.)
If your wiki is very large, you may want to consider specifying a query range in the conf file.
If your wiki is not in English, you will need to change (or remove) the morphology attribute.

To be continued...