A couple days ago, Andrew posted a news item titled Sphinx goes billions to the Sphinx web site.

Last but not least, Powered By section, now at 113 sites and counting, was updated and restyled. I had long wondered how much Sphinx search queries are performed per month if we sum all the sites using it, and whether we already hit 1B page views per month or not. Being open-source, there’s no easy way to tell. But now with the addition of craigslist to Powered By list I finally know that we do. Many thanks to Jeremy Zawodny who worked hard on making that happen, my itch is no more.

Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag! My first project at Craigslist was replacing MySQL FULLTEXT indexing with Sphinx. It wasn’t the easiest road in the world, for a variety of reasons, but we got it all working and it’s been humming along very well ever since. And I learned a heck of a lot about both Sphinx and craigslist internals in the process too.

I’m not going to go into a lot of details on the implementation here, other than to say Sphinx is faster and far more resource efficient than MySQL was for this task. In the MySQL and Search and Craigslist talk I’m giving at the 2009 MySQL Users Conference, I’ll go into a lot more detail about the unique problems we had and how we solved them.

For what it’s worth, the implementation isn’t really done. I did update the search help page on the site to reflect some of the capabilities (hey, look! OR searches!) but there are features I have planned that I’d like to expose as time allows.

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