Hi, i am not aware if whether or not Discourse uses sphinx for its search function http://sphinxsearch.com but it is very powerful and light. I know on my forum which uses Vbulletin, i had to integrate the sphynix search which works really well than the Mysql default search which comes with VB =) b/c we have around 5 million posts and 1.7+ million members. Vb Mysql default search was not the right approach for big to growing communities.
Does Discourse uses it for their search function? If not, i would really recommend it and if there is any plans for it?
Hi, why not Sphinx search ? I am not familiar with PostgreSQL but would it not face issues with big communities and high activity? If so, then i recommend Sphinx, it is light and doesn’t add stress on the server. It is great actually =)
Is there any future plan for it? allowing two options may be ? One that can use the Sphinx and another to use PostgreSQL. I am not sure if Sphinx works with Ruby. I am not familiar with this part.
I understand that for somebody coming from MySQL world notion that you can use database search facilities exclusively may sound… crazy, but thats not fair “standard” to judge other database engines fulltext search features.
Well, like i said, i am not familiar with it =) i don’t know if it will perform well under big communities. I would like to hear @codinghorror opinion on this and whether there is a future plan for it. It doesn’t hurt to have a setting in the admin page to choose the search type that you like to use.
VB has that function too, it provides you with the type of search in a drop down menu that you would like to use but they don’t support Sphinx, i had to look around and find a 3rd party plugin which gets installed and importing the plugin to work with vb. But Vb5 are supporting it though but it is currently in beta and not that great yet.
Just throwing this out there for some fun, but what if the search results were displayed in a way that would allow the user to still navigate around but having full search results displayed? Quick example:
Basically, the search bar and results pop out on a side panel that can be opened and closed at any time while maintaining the search results while the user continues to navigate discourse. Similar to how users can navigate while still having their reply/topic creation panel open. The user could also scroll up and down this panel, when they move their mouse within the panel, to view more of the listed results. I also like this idea because it keeps the results from covering up anything else on the page. Just thought it’d be fun Not sure about it conflicting with the reply/topic creation panel though. :o
Noticed how discourse looks unbalanced in my example. Maybe throw something on the left side as well?
I still encourage giving the option to use Sphinx Search.
Vbulletin 5.x even though in beta, their new software is using Sphinx, VB 4.x didn’t have it and the quality of search wasn’t fast nor great. Many had to use a 3rd party plugin to use it, it is also very light on servers. Vb learned its lesson though, because of the many complains coming from big forums with thousands of topics.
Well, we haven’t tried to use Discourse on big active boards. But I am a believer in using what is best out there instead of using what is just working nicely. If something is popular and known to be the best out there, then I would always use it.
Adding a dependency on Sphinx doesn’t seem necessary to me. Our complaint-driven development process hasn’t found that postgresql’s search is lacking. Sphinx is nice, but using it and maintaining it has a cost (search config, managing sphinx processes, re-indexing after deploys, etc.).
I use a Sphinx plugin for vb 4.x and it wasn’t complicated to install server side, then install the plugin and run re-index. Then after that, everything ran on its own. I haven’t tested Vb 5.x though which comes already with it.
It might not be urgent to use it atm but it is a very nice and essential feature in my opinion for Discourse. Many webmasters love to use Sphinx search because they know how powerfull and light it is when it comes to indexing millions of data and searching.
You can’t compare MySQL based boards where search is slow and painful to Discourse. One of the reasons it uses Postgresql is to work around those limitations.
Not sure about it conflicting with the reply/topic creation panel though. :o
