php - Which third party search engine (free) should I use?

Question

As the title says, I need a search engine... for mysql searching. My website is PHP based.

I was going with sphinx but my hosting company doesn't support full-text indexes!

So a search engine to be used without full-text!

It should be pretty powerful, and must include atleast these functions below:

• When searching for 'bmw 520' only matches where these two words come in exactly this order is returned. not matches for only 'bmw' or only '520'.

• When searching for 'bmw 330ci' results as the above will be returned, but, WITH AND WITHOUT the ci extension. There are a nr of extensions in cars as you all know (i, ci, si, fi etc).

• I want the 'minus sign' to 'exclude' all returns containing the word after the sign, ex: 'bmw -330' will return all 'bmw' results without the '330' ones. (a NOT instead of minus sign is also ok)

• all special character accents like 'é' are converted to their simple values, in this case 'e'.

• list of words to ignore completely in the search

Thanks guys!

Answer 1

The Zend_Lucene search competent works fairly well. I am not sure how it would cope with your second requirement, however if you customized the tokenized you should be able to do it by treating a change from letters to numbers as a new word.

The one I am really not sure about is the top requirement. Given how it is indexed, order becomes irreverent in the search, so you may not be able to do it without heavy editing of Lucene, writing a filter (using lucene to pull the matches, then checking the order), or writing your own solution. All of these will slow the search down, and add load to your server.

There is also solr, but I have never used it and don't know anything about it. Sphinx was another one, but I see you have already ruled that out.