thinking_sphinx and sphinx work beautifully, no indexing, query, install problems ever (5 or 6 install, including production slicehost ) why doesn’t everybody use sphinx, like, say craigslist? read here about its limitations (year and a half old articles. The sphinx developer, Aksyonoff, is working on these and he’s putting in features and reliability and stamping … Read more
Websolr provides a cloud-based Solr with a control panel. It’s in private beta as of this writing, but you can get the service through Heroku. Another hosted Solr service is PowCloud, also in private beta, which seems to offer strong WordPress integration. SolrHQ: another beta service providing a hosted Solr solution, with Joomla and WordPress … Read more
May be just run the command searchd without any parameter It shows following when I just tried Sphinx 0.9.9-release (r2117) Copyright (c) 2001-20009, Andrew Aksyonoff ….
Edit, 2016 — Why not both? If you’re interested in Postgres vs. Lucene, why not both? Check out the ZomboDB extension for Postgres, which integrates Elasticsearch as a first-class index type. Still a fairly early project but it looks really promising to me. https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb (Technically not available on Heroku, but still worth looking at.) Disclosure: I’m … Read more
I’ve been using Solr successfully for almost 2 years now, and have never used Sphinx, so I’m obviously biased. However, I’ll try to keep it objective by quoting the docs or other people. I’ll also take patches to my answer 🙂 Similarities: Both Solr and Sphinx satisfy all of your requirements. They’re fast and designed … Read more
Good to see someone’s chimed in about Lucene – because I’ve no idea about that. Sphinx, on the other hand, I know quite well, so let’s see if I can be of some help. Result relevance ranking is the default. You can set up your own sorting should you wish, and give specific fields higher … Read more
As the creator of ElasticSearch, maybe I can give you some reasoning on why I went ahead and created it in the first place :). Using pure Lucene is challenging. There are many things that you need to take care for if you want it to really perform well, and also, its a library, so … Read more