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Asked: 2026-06-10T04:20:46+00:00

I want to make a simple application in php that searches on a lot

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I want to make a simple application in php that searches on a lot of specific search engines and return the results well formatted.
Is it possible to use Sphinx as a Meta Search Engine or is it too slow?
I don’t want to index everything on a Mysql database but at the same time I don’t know if such an approach can be very resource-consuming.
I expect around 200000 query per day at least.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Not really. Sphinx indexes data in a database. Its designed for indexing relativly static data. ie data that doesnt change much. And then a wide verity of queires against that data…

    A meta search will contact multiple search engines, combine the results and display.

    You dont really need a ‘search engine’ (which is what sphinx is) to power this – the actual search happens on the remote services.

    Combining all the data is just a data manipulation project. Most of the work is going to be contacting the various search engines via their API (or even scraping) and then getting in consistent data format. Displaying the results is relatively trivial.

    (The exception, if your ‘meta search engine’ caches whole datasets locally and then needs to search them. Say you download the wikipedia dump, the geonames dump, and then want to search them. Sphinx will help with that. But it doesn’t sound that is what you want. )

    What you may want to it ‘cluster’ teh results, ie combine similar results from multiple remote engines. Carrot2 is a great project that would be almost ideal for this…
    http://project.carrot2.org/

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