Sphinx Search - Fast Text Searching in C++

Text searching is difficult to do well. You have the problem of word stems which most search engines do not manage well. Search for a word on Google and then search for its plural and you will get quite different word. The word race has multiple meanings and produces about 6 times as many search results on Google as does searching for races.

Sphinx Search (short for SQL Phrase Index) is a full-text search engine for Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris distributed under GPL version 2. It can return search results on 2-4GB of data in about 0.1 sec and supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL natively.Interestingly enough it supports stemming in English (and Russian). It indexes source documents on a specified set of fields, eg columns in SQL tables and is used in websites (over 100 listed including Craigslist.org, wikimapia.org and MySQL.com). I guess if you want fast text searching in C++, Sphinx is probably the first and last place you turn to and definitely worth including the in the C++ code library

• Link to C++ Code Library