Simon Willison’s Weblog

Digg Search: Now With 99.987% Less Suck. Really nice implementation of faceted search, still using Lucene and Solr under the hood.

# 10th April 2009, 10:17 pm / digg, facets, fulltext, lucene, search, solr

Sphinx 0.9.9-rc2 is out. Interesting new feature: the Sphinx search server now supports the MySQL binary protocol, so you can talk to it using a regular MySQL client library and fire off search queries using SELECT syntax and the new SphinxQL query language.

# 8th April 2009, 1:59 pm / fulltext, mysql, search, sphinx-search, sql

Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation. Alf Eaton loaded 13,000 Guardian articles tagged Science in to Solr and Lucene and is using Solr’s MoreLikeThisHandler to find related articles and automatically apply Guardian tags to Nature News articles.

# 11th March 2009, 12:53 pm / alf-eaton, fulltext, guardian, lucene, morelikethishandler, naturenews, openplatform, search, solr

PostgreSQL 8.3 beta 4 release notes. In addition to the huge speed improvements, 8.3 adds support for XML, UUID and ENUM data types and brings full text (tsearch2) in to the core database engine.

# 12th December 2007, 12:43 am / beta, databases, enum, fulltext, postgresql, tsearch2, uuid, xml

Opera 9.5 alpha, Kestrel, released. “With history search, Opera creates a full-text index of each and every page you visit, and when you go to the address bar, you can simply start entering words you know have been on pages you’ve visited before, and items matching your search show up.” I just tried this; it’s magic. I’m switching back to Opera from Camino.

# 16th September 2007, 8:34 pm / browsers, camino, fulltext, history, kestrel, opera, search

django-sphinx (via) More code from Curse Gaming; this time a really nice API for adding Sphinx full-text search to a Django model.

# 9th September 2007, 12:35 am / cursegaming, david-cramer, django, fulltext, orm, python, search, sphinx-search

SQLite Keynote. SQLite 3.3.8 has full text indexing!

# 21st October 2006, 11:44 pm / fulltext, sqlite