The benefits of using Sphinx are apparent. The old, default search engine did not consider a query like microsoft excel to mean microsoft AND excel, as Google and most other search engines do today. Instead, the old software considered the query to mean microsoft OR excel. This matched many irrelevant documents. Sphinx treats queries like this the same way Google does, with an implied AND between terms. Sphinx also supports many other options, as explained in the software's syntax documentation.
However, several known issues with Sphinx remain. Sphinx is the only third-party search engine that has official support from Invision. However, we found that it took many weeks to get Sphinx to successfully index the Lounge's 700,000+ posts, because certain aspects of IP.Board 3.0 do not integrate with Sphinx as expected. While we attempt to program around these limitations or obtain patches from Invision, our new, improved search engine will still exhibit at least the following known issues:
1. Default order of phrase-search results. Sphinx supports phrase searching like Google, where a search on "microsoft excel" (with quotation marks) matches only documents that contain that phrase. Also, parentheses can be used to create phrase searches, such as (microsoft excel). However, the default order in which the results are sorted does not place phrase matches first. Instead, documents that contain both words but not as a phrase can appear at the top of the results. We hope to make the order default to the most relevant matches first.
2. Member names in the Members tab. IP.Board 3.0 is not allowing Sphinx to show links in the Members tab of the search results page to the members who match a query. Invision technical support says this feature should be working in IPB 3, but they agree that it is not. While we wait for a patch, you can click any member's name in the profile area of any post so see the member's profile (if you are signed in). Posts by a particular member still appear in the Posts tab of the search results page, just as with the old search engine. EDIT: This is fixed, see next post.
3. Help info in the Help Topics tab. Sphinx should also match documents in the Help file, but Invision currently does not display any hits in the Help Topics tab of the search results page. Fortunately, the table of contents of the help material, which is accessible from the main Lounge menu, is usually easy to use to locate help topics.
If you see other bugs in the new search engine that our developers might be able to correct, please reply to this thread and let us know. We are still in the middle of the beta process of rewriting every aspect of the Lounge software. Improving the search engine, however, is one of our top priorities. Thanks for your help.
This post has been edited by Brian Livingston: 2010-03-03 22:07
Reason for edit: to add reference to member-name fix
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