Thread:Extension talk:SphinxSearch/Some pages arent found - and the "second" search is different than the first one/reply (3)

For both issues, I would recommend performing your Sphinx testing with SphinxQL. SphinxQL can be tweaked to match the MediaWiki search results, whereas search.exe is a little less flexible. You may also need some additional parameters in the query to fully get it to match the MediaWiki configuration. Using SphinxQL, you can take away the MediaWiki layer and get a better idea of exactly how Sphinx is working behind the scenes (although is probably less needed since you don't have many results returned.).