Extension talk:SphinxSearch/LQT Archive 1

Troubleshooting
You might want to check with the troubleshooting page, because some of the standard issues have been converted from the talk page due to their general nature.

Feature requests
Feature requests should generally be created as bugzilla report and marked as enhancement. This process helps to consolidate and prioritize any request.

MW Search and advanced search form feature
With version 0.8+, the SphinxSearch uses the standard MW search interface. Despite the simple interface which works most of the time, we do believe that an advanced search functionality for the MW search should be an important feature to ensure information can be correctly disseminated. Unfortunately still in MW 1.17, 1.18 it is not possible for the advanced search screen to have more options than just to select to namespaces.

Any website that stores large amount of information provides advanced search input features. This bugzilla report is open since 2010, so people who feel compelled that such a feature should be implemented in the core MW search interface should vote and raise their voices in bugzilla.

feature request: show categories in result list
it would be great to be able to list the categories of articles in search results. --Nilsja 01:29, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * This would be a neat feature, and one my users would like. I looked in SphinxSearch_Body.php as this is where the excerpt is generated. I am not php expert, but couldn't easily see where the categories of the result articles were stored, or how to add these to the generated excerpt, perhaps as a list just before the text excerpt is shown. This would be really useful. Happy to add this to a hack in My current version if someone would suggest what needs to get added. -- Brett.tyson 13:20, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Sphinx and PDF indexing
PDF indexing could be neat feature in future (PDF's stored in Mediawiki's image folder). This section works as preliminary research section in how this might be achieved. Notes from the sphinx forum suggest that ''a script to output an XML dump from the files on the filesystem and turn it into a large file for the xmlpipe2 method ... or output it to multiple files which can be indexed with Sphinx''
 * Sphinx forum, xpdf integration
 * Sphinx forum, PDF indexer
 * pdf2xml

Adding search inputbox to a page
Not related to this extension but since 0.8+, SphinxSearch is supporting the standard MW Search interface and by using the InputBox extension one can setup a search input box per page. The Inputbox will redirect to the MW search and display results if found. For details on how to use the InputBox extension, please see examples provided on that particular page.

How to avoid redirects in the result display
You have to modify your sphinx.conf configuration file and add the parameter page_is_redirect=0 to your sql_query statement. Depending on your sql_query configuration, statements may vary.

Before sql_query = SELECT page_id, page_title, page_namespace, old_id, old_text \ FROM page, revision, text WHERE rev_id=page_latest AND old_id=rev_text_id After sql_query = SELECT page_id, page_title, page_namespace, old_id, old_text \ FROM page, revision, text WHERE rev_id=page_latest AND old_id=rev_text_id and page_is_redirect=0


 * More recent versions of the extension have a default sphinx.conf that collects page_is_redirect as an attribute that is used in filtering, the same way MW search works in general. This approach should be used only if you never ever what to see redirects in search results. Svemir Brkic 17:54, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Search syntax
Beginning with 0.8+ the extension supports "intitle:", "incategory:", "prefix:", and other advanced Wikipedia search techniques. It further supports the extended sphinx search syntax such as the proximity search operator: "hello world"~10 and boolean operators.

Search suggestions
A detailed description about different modes of search suggestions can be found here.

SQLite Configuration
Information on how to prepare a SQLite configuration.

Help for Windows users
Some issues related to Windows are described here.

Help for Linux users
Some issues related to Linux are described here.

Working well in MW1.5!
Everyone I have spoken to that uses our internal Wiki has nothing but positives to say about this. I really think MediaWiki should adopt Sphinx as the DEFAULT search, as the bundled one is so bad. --195.75.83.25 08:45, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Note that the next release will not use ExtensionFunctions, and it will require at least MW 1.7 (and PHP5 in general.) Also note that it was never intended for MW <1.9 - no idea how you got it to work with 1.5 :-) Svemir Brkic 19:45, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Running on separate machines
My wiki is on shared hosting, so I can't install Sphinx on its server. I run the search backend (presently Lucene, but Sphinx sounds promising) on a machine in my home. With Lucene, my backend machine SSHs into the webserver, grabs a dump of the wiki, indexes it, and then runs search queries from the webserver through the index it generates and sends the results back to the webserver. It's a rather convoluted setup (and it's even messier when it comes to updating the index), but I'm wondering if I can do anything along the same lines here. --Emufarmers 20:08, 11 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Sphinx.conf file can be configured to make sphinxd run on a different machine (let's call it Machine S, for sphinx) from the machine running MySQL (let's call it Machine M, for mysql). However, in that case Machine S has to have netword access to Machine M. My guess is that something similar to your present setup with SSH tunnels could be done here as well. If you are interested in trying this out, please let me know via email (see extension credits) and we could work through these questions then. --Gri6507 22:17, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

I am very interested to know how this configuration has worked for users. I have read many articles that state the problem of "I run a wiki, but it's through a shared hosting and installing the Sphinx daemon is out of the question". This is also my case - so in an effort to get better search capabilities than the standard search, this appears to be one of my only options. A few questions I have: how much traffic is involved when the indexing is performed? Is it a problem to have the daemon going across the wire to access the SQL database for indexing? I have concerns that it will drastically increase my bandwidth usage. Second, I think it would be a great addition to the extension to redirect/use the standard search if the sphinxd cannot be found (if the daemon machine goes offline). Just some ramblings but I am interested in anyone's thoughts - Blac0177 06:04, 12 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Daemon does not do the indexing. That is done with a separate process which you run on a schedule. Daemon simply searches the index and returns the results. Search requests are small, and search results depend on the actual data being searched. You could have a replica of your database on the machine that runs the indexer and the daemon - just as it is described above in the Lucene example. You just need to make sure that your web server can communicate on the specified host and port to your sphinx daemon (and that nobody else can, as a security precaution.) Your bandwidth usage will depend on two things - the way you use to replicate the database, and the amount of search queries you get.


 * For replication, if it is MySQL and you can turn on binary logs, you can just replay those logs on your local copy. This is in case the database is too big to copy entire thing over for every indexer run. You could also dump just the records modified since the last run, since indexer does not really need your entire database - it only needs those tables that it actually indexes. Svemir Brkic 18:57, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Searching multiple wikis
I currently have 3 wikis indexed with Sphinx. The search works well, but it is returning results for all of them. I've set the "$wgSphinxSearch_index = X"; line in the SphinxSearch.php. Am I missing something? --N0ctrnl 20:28, 24 March 2008 (UTC)


 * New in 0.7: $wgSphinxSearch_index_list lets you specify the list of indexes to search. You can have multiple main and delta indexes on the machine, and each wiki can define its own pair to search. You can also combine several index files and assign different weight to each of them, using $wgSphinxSearch_index_weights array. Svemir Brkic 01:06, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Search through various indexes are failing to display combined results
On our 1.15.1 wiki system we are using SphinxSearch version 0.7 and the query log shows that a search on
 * both indexes are search for 0.023 sec [ext/1/rel 7 (0,15)] [wiki_main,wiki_incremental,research_main,research_incremental] Cotterrell but the search on one wiki system only shows results from [wiki_main,wiki_incremental] where results from [research_main,research_incremental] are not shown.
 * [research_main,research_incremental] are indexed and
 * SphinxSearch.php has been maintained with $wgSphinxSearch_index_list = "wiki_main,wiki_incremental,research_main,research_incremental"; and $wgSphinxSearch_index_weights has been set.

Changing to the other wiki system (1.16beta) for the search term 'kotler' would result in Displaying 61-75 of 87 matches for query kotler retrieved in 0.008 sec with these stats: kotler found 200 times in 107 documents Above numbers may include documents not listed due to search options. but would not show any result in the list (as those terms only exist on the 1.15.1 system). We conclude that the search term is found in the index files but something hinder to display results from one wiki on the others wiki result page.

Is their an option to set a split or combined display of search results and in case of a combined display also render the right url to an article pending on the server.

Any suggestions how to solve this would be appreciated --MWJames 01:35, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

^^ **I can confirm that this problem with my setup as well** --01:35, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Facing the same issue, I have about 5 Wiki's and only the results of the main wiki are being displayed as links. --AutoStatic 15:10, 23 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Sphinx is not storing all the information needed to display the results. It only stores IDs and some other specific attributes such as the namespace. String content is only indexed - stored in some special manner that allows fast searching. When displaying search results, sphinx must have access to the original database to be able to lookup the titles and show the links. Svemir Brkic 17:25, 23 September 2010 (UTC)


 * What do you mean exactly by 'have access to the original database'? Where can I set these access rights? So it has probably nothing to do with the way I set up my Wiki's (http://www.steverumberg.com/wiki/index.php?title=WikiHelp_-_Method_Two)? --AutoStatic 12:26, 21 October 2010 (UTC)


 * SphinxSearch extension asks for search results from the index. It does not know how those results got into the index. It assumes they all came from the wiki database extension runs on currently. In order to display search results, extension needs to make additional database queries to the database the search results came from originally. This is not a matter or access rights. Extension was not designed to support multiple databases in this way. Such support would have to be added by someone - perhaps by adding an array that maps each index to a specific database. Svemir Brkic 15:44, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Hello Svemir, all wiki's share the same database, they only have a different prefix. --AutoStatic 14:54, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Is there any way to prevent Sphinx from indexing particular pages?
I realize this runs counter to what most people would want, but some pages don't need to be indexed. I've made some reasonable searches here and on the Sphinx site, and believe this is more relevant to a MediaWiki discussion than Sphinx in general. Jon Doran, 9 May 2008


 * You could modify the query in sphinx.conf to filter out any pages you do not want. It could be done based on namespace, a join with some other table (e.g. categorylinks,) or some new field or table you would create yourself. Svemir Brkic 01:23, 10 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the suggestions. I did not consider the query, but now that you mention it, there is a lot I can do with it.  Jon Doran, 10 May 2008

Question when searching for IP's
We use the Wiki here in an IT setting so many of our articles refer IP addresses. The default search does not find any variation of IPs when searched (for example 102., 102.160.2.2, 106..etc.) Can anyone tell me if this search does a better job with this? Thanks. --Comalia 19:37, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
 * It would certainly do a better job than MySQL full-text index - even in default configuration. You could also tweak it further, but I am not sure I fully understand what exactly you need. If you provide a some specific examples of data and search strings that should match it, I can test it. Svemir Brkic 22:45, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Sure. Say that I have a few articles that have the line of text 192.165.1.0 in them. So, if searching for 192.165.1.0, would it return any results? Or variations of it, such as "192.165"? --Comalia 13:41, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, both searches will match that article. It will consider 192, 165, 1, and 0 as separate "words". You can tell it whether to search for all those words or any of them (it is an option on the search page, but you can also change the default.) Since proximity of the matched words is an important factor, you will get the articles that have entire IP in them first. Svemir Brkic 16:46, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Keyword Priority in Query String
It seems that the order of keywords actually changes the results. In my case, if I send a space delimited list of keywords, I get different search results depending on the position of my most important keywords. Am I missing a setting that prioritizes keywords based on there position in the query string? Cedarrapidsboy 13:45, 26 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, order of keywords matters, as well as the order and proximity of the matches in searched text. That is the function of the Sphinx itself, but you can affect it by changing the matching mode in SphinxSearch.php. Svemir Brkic 17:01, 26 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Is the order of keywords documented?  I mean to say, where can I find information on where to put my most important words, and then my least important words?  I understand the matching modes, but haven't read any mention of keyword position (with no operators joining them) affecting priority.  I'm sure I'm likely blind. 12.207.221.230 00:23, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Feature Request: Excluding Selected Categories from search
Will be useful to filter results not only by pointing to desired categories, but also by setting undesired categories $cl->SetFilter('category', $categories_to_exclude, true);

The Search Form will be like this: Include   Exclude Category1       [x]        [ ] Category2       [ ]        [ ] ... Category7        [ ]        [x] Category8       [ ]        [ ] --StasFomin 14:59, 10 November 2008 (UTC)


 * New in 0.7: $wgUseExcludes Svemir Brkic 01:59, 18 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Latest SVN version (0.8.4, r96768) allows you to exclude categories by adding "-incategory:Foo" to the search query. Svemir Brkic 02:33, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia
Can anyone tell me why Wikipedia has not installed this extension? According to the main article, it works with Wikipedia. --Robinson Weijman 09:59, 21 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia already uses a Lucene search engine. —Emufarmers(T 11:53, 21 January 2009 (UTC)


 * OK, thanks. So when and why would SphinxSearch be better than Lucene-Search - and vice versa?  --Robinson Weijman 07:34, 22 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Lucene has more features and is a more stable and mature product. It also needs more resources and is harder to install and maintain. Sphinx is still evolving - both the search engine itself and MediaWiki extension. It may not have all the features of Lucene yet, but it is much easier to setup and try out. If it does not do something you need, by all means go for Lucene. Svemir Brkic 14:00, 22 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks both of you for your feedback.--Robinson Weijman 08:57, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Case Sensitivity
Is SphinxSearch case sensitive? --Robinson Weijman 11:42, 10 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, if you use default sphinx.conf that comes with it. If you want to change that, remove the "A..Z->a..z, " part from the charset_table setting. Svemir Brkic 13:53, 10 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the prompt response! --Robinson Weijman 15:16, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Search Results without Wikicode/Wiki markup
Does anyone have experience in excluding wikicode / wiki markup from being displayed in the search results? I couldn't find anything on the Sphinx site. Thanks in advance, labalena 149.211.153.96


 * There is no easy way. Sphinx does not know anything about wiki markup - it can only be told to strip HTML when indexing. You could in theory keep a separate copy of active revisions, with wiki markup removed with some script, and index that instead of the real content. Svemir Brkic 02:32, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Handling of HTML tags
There are problems with the current handling of HTML tags: The  tags that highlight the match are inserted into the result before the result is run through , requiring   to exclude the   tag. This has potential to cause problems, when  tags are used in Wiki pages.

Furthermore, strip_tags gets confused (and removes a lot of wanted content) by input like which is likely to appear on Wiki pages. --Patrick Nagel 09:48, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * 3<4
 * Run  on the shell to send an e-mail containing the contents of file text to who@ev.er.


 * Somehow I forgot to take care of this. I am dealing with another highlighting issue now, so I will try to fix this problem as well. As a workaround, you can try setting $wgSphinxSearchMWHighlighter to true after you include sphinx in your LocalSettings. That will use MW's own highlighter which may be better in some cases (and worse in others...) Svemir Brkic 00:28, 10 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Fixed in 0.8.3 (r96735) Svemir Brkic 20:07, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Sorting by namespace
Is this possible? I'm not able to find a clear way to do it in the documentation, but am looking for some way to put one of our existing namespaces at the top of all the other hits. Any ideas? As always, thanks in advance. CaliVW78 13:39, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * See above --Svemir Brkic 19:58, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Default Namespaces
How can you change which namespaces are searched by default when Sphinx Search is run? I'd like it if the search would automatically include category pages as well as standard articles.

194.98.70.14 08:37, 19 August 2011 (UTC)


 * You should just need to adjust $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault. —Emufarmers(T 02:27, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Grouping results by Namespace
I have the extension running but since it doesn't support the weighting of results, is there a way to group the results by the namespace they belong to? -- 20:48, 14 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Version 0.7 supports $wgSphinxSearch_index_weights array, which lets you specify a weight for each index you have. You still need to setup those indexes manually, as it does not make much sense to have that as the default setup. I will try to prepare a sample sphinx.conf for such a setup - unless somebody else beats me to it (HINT: you can have the main query include only namespace 0, and a supplemental index for other namespaces, or even each namespace separately. You will also need to have more than one incremental index, but maybe you will decide other namespaces do not need to get updated as frequently...) Svemir Brkic 04:08, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Pages made from templates/transcluded pages do not rank well
So far Sphinx search produces the best result of all the search engines I have tried. Recently I have noticed that some my templates and sub pages are appearing higher in the search results than the main page that includes them. I understand that the indexer does not parse any of the wiki text and only looks at a single page entity. Is it possible to specify groups of related pages so that my main page will contain all of the text of it sub pages?

For Example, if Page-main =>(includes) Page-info & Page-index then I want all the text on Page-info and Page-index to be included in the results for Page-main. I can even go as far as saying that it is a rule that pages have a strict naming convention -main -info -index

Or is there some way for the indexer to know that -index is 'linked to' by -main and include the results for -index in main.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Result weighting
Hello,

I have a little problem with the sortings in the result page.

For e.g. if I search for mysql I get every entry but the sorting is horrible. I have several pages with mysql in text and as part of the page_title.

I would like to have the page_title parts in front of the appearing in body results. I set the

in SphinxSearch.php.

I also tried sql_attr_uint  = page_title in my sphinx.conf. but didn't help at all to get a better result.

Settings in the sphinxapi.php: Matching mode is set to extended. Sort mode is set to relevance. Tried every type but this is the best so far. Group mode is set to SPH_GROUPBY_ATTR and ranker is the default one.

I would be very pleased if someone could help me.

Greetings,

Tom


 * sql_attr_uint is only for numeric values. It is used for filtering. After you adjust this and the weights, make sure to rebuild the index and restart the deamon, just in case. In our case, we always get the title matches first. Our weights are 'old_text'=>1, 'page_title'=>100, extended match mode, and we leave sorting and grouping at default (we do not set them at all.) Svemir Brkic 13:16, 8 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks for the quick answer. I turned it back to default. Rebuilded the index, after the changes but still for e.g. i get a page with the title Statistics infront of a page called MySQL5. It has something todo with the weight of upcomming words in body i guess but as I defined the weight of page_title higher than the old_text, i guess it should be vice verca. Greetings, Tom.


 * What versions of sphinx, the extension, etc. do you use? Svemir Brkic 03:12, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi,

basic sphinx installer is sphinx-0.9.8.1. Extension Sphinx is SphinxSearch-0.6.1. PS: Mediawiki is version 1.15.0 Tom

Strange output
I'm running the SphinxSearch on a standard LAMP setup (CentOS 5.3, Apache 2.2.14, MySQL 5.0.77, PHP 5.2.11) with MediaWiki 1.15.1. Searches keep returning well formatted and readable page titles, but garbage for the excerpts, like: Has anyone else seen this or have an idea of where to look?


 * Do you have $wgCompressRevisions enabled? It looks like by default this extension sets Sphinx up to read text.old_text directly out of the database, which will not give useful results if you have any of our fancier storage features enabled. (Compressed revisions, batch compression, external storage, 'cur' table back-compat entries, legacy encoding back-compat entries, etc.) In this case you'd need to feed updates into Sphinx over an xmlpipe source or something... --brion 08:55, 6 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Excellent catch. I do have $wgCompressRevisions enabled.  As a result, I had tried altering the sql_query statements in sphinx.php to accont for that with " " to no avail.  What puzzles me is that the page titles come out just fine, but the full text excerpts don't.  How would I go about feeding updates into Sphinx over an xmlpipe since it's all in a MySQL DB?


 * Unfortunately, it is not that kind of compression that Brion is talking about. There are some comments above about using xmlpipe, but I did not play with those myself. There are also other ways you could try working around this. I would consider using the Manual:CompressOld.php script periodically, instead of enabling $wgCompressRevisions. That way current revision text will not be compressed and sphinx will work just fine, but you will still have old revisions compressed. Svemir Brkic 18:43, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Only strange characters with new pages
Since a few weeks now with experience a strange behaviour. When using sphinxsearch we get on the resultpage strange characters. Before we had never a problem with sphinsearch No changes were made in the entire installation of mediawiki and all extensions we use. example: +I-.I��K�(���J�L�PH�


 * M.W.: 1.15.1
 * PHP : 5.3.5
 * MySQL : 5.5.8
 * SphinxSearch: Version 0.7.0

Have you experienced this kind of behaviour ? --217.149.129.145 07:32, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * We had similar issues when our cache settings included $wgCompressRevisions = true; (LocalSettings.php); see also --MWJames 15:31, 25 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Please see Extension_talk:SphinxSearch Svemir Brkic 03:15, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Search Results within Interlinks counted as double
A rather philosophical questions, but if one uses interlinks (normal interlink, semantic interlink) such as Cateora, Philip R. then a search for the term Cateora would be counted twice in the search result screen.

The system configuration Sphinx Version 0.9.9, SphinxSearch Version 0.6.1, LightTPD 1.4.22, MediaWiki	1.15.1, PHP	5.2.9-1 (cgi-fcgi), MySQL	5.0.77-community-nt,


 * Default setup indexes the wiki source. You could use xml pipe or some other approach to index parsed articles. That would solve this and some other issues. I may look into that in the future. Svemir Brkic 14:52, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Installing a different language (morphology) for sphinx
I'm trying to install a french stemmer: morphology=libstemmer_french as suggested here: http://www.sphinxsearch.com/forum/view.html?id=11#9507

Of course I downloaded libstemmer.c.tgz and extracted it to libstemmer.c.

I added --with-libstemmer to ./configure. All seems to have gone well (got lots of verbose when make entered this directory):

Making all in libstemmer_c make[1]: Entering directory `/home/inmdev/Downloads/sphinx-0.9.9/libstemmer_c' gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I../config -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include/mysql -Wall -g -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -O3 -DNDEBUG -MT stem_ISO_8859_1_danish.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/stem_ISO_8859_1_danish.Tpo -c -o stem_ISO_8859_1_danish.o `test -f 'src_c/stem_ISO_8859_1_danish.c' || echo './'`src_c/stem_ISO_8859_1_danish.c mv -f .deps/stem_ISO_8859_1_danish.Tpo .deps/stem_ISO_8859_1_danish.Po gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I../config -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include/mysql -Wall -g -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -O3 -DNDEBUG -MT stem_UTF_8_danish.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/stem_UTF_8_danish.Tpo -c -o stem_UTF_8_danish.o `test -f 'src_c/stem_UTF_8_danish.c' || echo './'`src_c/stem_UTF_8_danish.c mv -f .deps/stem_UTF_8_danish.Tpo .deps/stem_UTF_8_danish.Po [...]

After all this I try ./indexer --all --config ../../SphinxSearch-0.6.1/sphinx.conf and I get the following warning: WARNING: index 'wiki_main': invalid morphology option 'libstemmer_french' - IGNORED

According to libstimmer.c/libstimmer/modules.txt, the french module can be refered to by either french, fr, fre, fra... french UTF_8,ISO_8859_1 french,fr,fre,fra

Anyways, don't know where to go from here. Fabricebaro 19:01, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

PS: I posted this matter here too: http://www.sphinxsearch.com/forum/view.html?id=19#22615


 * What did you put in your sphinx.conf instead of "morphology = stem_en"? I would try "morphology = stem_fr" --Svemir Brkic 04:46, 7 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the omission (I removed this info by accident). I tried:
 * * morphology = libstemmer_french
 * * morphology = libstemmer_fr
 * * morphology = stem_fr
 * * morphology = french
 * It should be libstemmer_french according to http://www.sphinxsearch.com/forum/view.html?id=11

Activating "Did you mean" with a French wiki
I installed SphinxSearch on a French wiki. When I activate "Did you mean" I get the following error (displayed at the top of the search result page): Also I do have some English in the wiki. Is it possible to use both languages for spelling suggestions ? Fabricebaro 18:42, 13 January 2010 (UTC)


 * You need to find out how to install French dictionary for pspell. If yuou actually have it installed, but the language code is not "fr" for some reason, you can edit that line in SphinxSearch_spell.php and change  to whatever it should be - even if you have to hard-code the string. Spelling suggestions in both languages would require some additional work in the same file - if you can find someone who knows some PHP... Svemir Brkic 01:07, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Always add wildcard better automatically add wildcard?
The SphinxSearch-Extension is running nicely here on openSUSE with MW 1.15.1. I would love to be able to do the following:

Define a number x as a variable. After searching for "string" and the number of results is =< x, the search is automatically changed to "string*" and results are shown.

Alternatively: being able to switch on always adding a * to every search term. If I enter "string", "string*" will be searched.

Is it feasible?


 * One way to do this yourself is to find  in SphinxSearch_body.php and change it to   (of course, it would be better to first check if * is already in there, or if there are multiple words, or to use a preg_replace to do it conditionally, but I am kind of pressed for time right now...) Svemir Brkic 01:14, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Cannot Find Wiki Main
I installed SphinxSearch but when I do:

$> /path/to/sphinx/search/ --config /path/to/sphinx.conf "search string"

I get an error saying:

index 'wiki_main' : search error: failed to open /var/data/sphinx/wiki_main.sph: No such file or dierctory


 * The error is misleading, all you need to do is to create the mentioned directory, and the script will take care of the rest.
 * Jahângir

Is there a publicly available wiki with SpinxSearch installed?
I am looking into both SphinxSearch and LuceneSearch. I would like to try out both before installing one or the other. Is there a publicly available wiki with SpinxSearch installed on which I can try out some queries? Also, I need the following capabilities and wonder if SphinxSearch supports them: 1) ability to search pages for specific tags (e.g.,, ) ; 2) ability to index a site with on the order of 150,000 articles, and 3) exporting a list of pages (identified either by page name or some internal identifier like page_id) to an external file. Dnessett 18:07, 25 February 2010 (UTC)


 * NWE uses Sphinx. It has 107,378 total pages in the database, but less than 20,000 are actual articles. I see no reason not to be able to handle 150,000 or more, given enough disk space and memory. sphinx engine itself is used on some very big sites. You can search for tags, but it is ignoring special characters by default, so it will find the alphanumeric part only. Dealing properly with tags would require some customization, but should not be too hard if you know PHP. As for exporting, the extension now supports MediaWiki Search API, so you could provide a link that would open the api request in XML or text format, for example (or point it to a script that would format it further.) Svemir Brkic 18:30, 25 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Dnessett 18:37, 25 February 2010 (UTC)


 * A follow-up question. I have looked through the sphinx and sphinx extension documentation, but could not find the answer to the following question. Suppose I want to index the same db twice, once using the standard character set and a second time using an enhanced character set including characters that are used in wikitext markup (e.g., "{", "}", "<", ">"). Is this possible? Would I need to run two instances of the sphinx daemon, each with a different configuration file and different directory targets to separate their activity? Or is there some way to utilize the same daemon to run two indexes? Dnessett 20:59, 25 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Single daemon can have multiple data sources specified in sphinx.conf file. We do that by default, actually so that we can have a main + delta index. You may add more and extension will search all of them by default. More advanced configuration is also possible. Svemir Brkic 00:33, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Create the page "I want to create a new page" on this wiki!
Can anyone tell me if it's possible to have SphinxSearch provide a link to create a new page if it doesn't find an existing page in the search results? I liked this feature in the default search engine. Thanks! --WilkBoy 14:43, 31 March 2010 (UTC)


 * If you press enter or click Go, a red link "create this page" will appear. If you click search, it will not. Svemir Brkic 18:55, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

hi - this doesnt work for me, i get at the top of the page, with no red link. would like to have the create new page on results page. Thanks! Selspiero


 * This has been fixed in versions 0.8 and above. Svemir Brkic 00:34, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Semantic Wiki and Sphinx
This topic is surely not on your urgent list, but semantic abilities for a Wiki become more and more import and we are using it extensively throughout our Wiki to build ontologies and give pages characteristics other than the standard. Do you have any plans to give some thoughts on how to integrate select statements for the Semantic Wiki Extension. We assume that pages with specific properties and keywords should be ranked higher in the search hierarchy than standard pages without those special classification. It could be a nice feature in comparison with other MW search engines.

Thanks, James


 * I am in the process of re-engineering some parts of the extension. I am making it use more of the standard MW search code (which improved significantly since this extension was first developed,) but I am also looking for more ways to make it better than the default. I will look into Semantic Wiki and how to integrate with it when available. Svemir Brkic 20:32, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Compatible with $wgEnableMWSuggest?
Is this extension compatible with the $wgEnableMWSuggest = true; setting? I can't get that to work. If not, is it a planned enhancement? Thanks! Gomeztogo 23:06, 30 April 2010 (UTC)


 * The lastest version (0.8.2, svn r9671) will use sphinx for as-you-type suggestions if you have both $wgEnableMWSuggest and $wgEnableSphinxPrefixSearch set to true. Svemir Brkic 02:57, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Category filter
I just installed sphinx search on MW 1.17a and it works fine.. but there is no category filter. Is that an option one could enable somewhere? Or is it currently blank? Or am I just experiencing a bug?


 * Latest version (0.8.1+) replaces old "hierarchical categories" approach with a simpler, yet more flexible "incategory" prefix, similar to English Wikipedia search. These feature is still under development, but you should already be able to search like this:

foo incategory:Bar


 * Make sure "sql_attr_multi = uint category..." line is not commented-out in your sphinx.conf file. Category search is case-sensitive and you have to use underscores instead of spaces, at least for now. Support for excluding categories and including category children is coming soon. Svemir Brkic 03:04, 10 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm using MW 1.17 and extension 0.8.2, which works great. But, what's the best way to search within one category using a search box? I want to add a search field on one page that searches only content in that category. Possible? Thanks. 62.231.49.30 15:31, 16 September 2011 (UTC)


 * That is something you would have to do with hooks, in the skin, and/or with custom javascript. Svemir Brkic 16:34, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
 * You might have a look at Adding search inputbox to a page --MWJames 16:47, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Feature request / Using the search function in templates
Maybe a bit far fetched, but maybe you could provide a search function such as {#ssearch } that can be called in a template and return the results as ul or ol list where the amount of search results is limit by a variable parsed through the function. --MWJames 05:33, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Where defines these hooks?
in the sphinxsearch_body.php i found these codes:

wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchFilterSearchableNamespaces', array( &$namespaces ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchGetSearchableCategories', array( &$categories ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchGetNearMatch', array( &$term, &$t ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchBeforeResults', array( wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchBeforeQuery', array( &$this->search_term, &$cl ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchAfterResults', array( $term, $this->page ) );

i looked up every files of sphinxsearch, bus still can not found the functions such as "SphinxSearchFilterSearchableNamespaces" "SphinxSearchBeforeQuery", i wang to know how them works, but i can't find the function definition.

who can help me, many thx! 121.8.153.6 09:39, 30 July 2010 (UTC)


 * These are all optional hooks, so they are not defined by default. Some of them will be deprecated soon, as standard MW search-related hooks will be available in this extension as well. Once that is cleaned up, I will document any sphinx-specific hooks that remain. For now, just see where they are called and what arguments they receive. That should give you an idea about what you may be able to do with them. Svemir Brkic 15:38, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Can't get negation to work, always finds all words
I'm struggling to get the negate search option to work, i.e. searching for "word1 -word2" still shows hits for both words, instead of those with only word1. The search CLI tool works fine, though.

I have already tried the different search modes ($wgSphinxSearch_mode: SPH_MATCH_EXTENDED, SPH_MATCH_EXTENDED2, SPH_MATCH_BOOLEAN). SphinxSearch extension 0.7.0 and Sphinx 1.10-beta (r2420) (but same behavior with 0.9.9-release (r2117)), MediaWiki 1.12.0

Any help would be greatly appreciated! --Mmaddin 08:18, 5 August 2010 (UTC)


 * There is definitely something broken now, I also can't use quotes for a phrase match ("word1 word2") - it always finds OR match, or, if I choose "match all words" via the radio button, it finds AND match. I need to make AND match the default, but there is no option, except setting $wgSphinxSearch_mode to SPH_MATCH_ALL - but then there is no radio button anymore (for the rare cases where an OR match is useful). There is not much missing for this extension to be a really great alternative to the built-in search - but right now there is a number of small but annoying (maybe cosmetic, but still important) bugs, that really need to be fixed. --Patrick Nagel 02:03, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Shortly after posting this, I found $wgSphinxMatchAll in the code (can't find documentation anywhere), which you can set to true in LocalSettings.php. Then the radio buttons are there, but "match all words" is selected by default. --Patrick Nagel 02:06, 31 August 2010 (UTC)


 * All these issues are fixed in current SVN version (0.8+) Svemir Brkic 03:07, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

successfully controls the search results according to user rights
i have an extension named rarc, which builds a category and uses the same name as the name of a user group. By adding only users who belongs to the xxx user group can see this page. At first, the sphinxsearch do not care of this privilege rules, still displays the search results. With the recommendation of the sphinxsearch author, i build 5 indexes to implement this. wiki_main --includes everyting expect todays new articles wiki_incremental --index automatically every 2mins, just today's new articles, and merge at night with the wiki_main wiki_small_main --some thing like wiki_main, but exclude the private articles wiki_small_incremental --some thing like wiki_incremental, but exclude the private articles wiki_private --every private articals of the wikisits (due to small amount of articls, no need to build the incre+merg mechanism )

modified the codes, if a user belonged to xxx user group, then search with (wiki_small_main wiki_small_incremental wiki_private ) if it is a normal user, the searchlist is (wiki_small_main wiki_small_incremental)

the wiki_main is uesed to display the breif cntent of the article according to the page_id.

can only one tell me where defines these hooks such as 		wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchFilterSearchableNamespaces', array( &$namespaces ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchGetSearchableCategories', array( &$categories ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchGetNearMatch', array( &$term, &$t ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchBeforeResults', array( wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchBeforeQuery', array( &$this->search_term, &$cl ) ); wfRunHooks( 'SphinxSearchAfterResults', array( $term, $this->page ) );

i use powergrep to search in the directory of /extesnion/sphinxsearch and /sphinx, both of them don't contains only of these "SphinxSearchFilterSearchableNamespaces"  or 'SphinxSearchGetSearchableCategories' 121.8.153.6 08:23, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Did you mean? pigtailed pigtailed pigtailed Aggregate ....No.
For some reason when I try to search part of a title the search will not locate the article. Instead it preforms a full-text search omitting article titles and asks if I meant "pigtailed Keyword Searched". The same thing happens no matter the parameters I set (i.e. match titles only etc).--Siadsuit 18:37, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

possible to install without compiler?
Hi, in my hosting plan, the compiler is disabled. I'm wondering if i can install sphinx without using a compiler? Is it possible for me to compile it locally, and just upload and run? --Wmama 05:06, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Templates / Transclusion - returns only template not users
If I have a template called Cereals with the contents "Rice, Wheat, Rye", and then I use that template in an article, and then search for "Wheat" I only get the template, not the page using the template. I guess this makes sense since MW doesn't store the rendered content, it expands the templates on the fly when the page is rendered.

I was thinking to have sphinx index all the rendered pages instead, any ideas as to how? --72.148.136.13 23:01, 12 October 2010 (UTC)


 * ARGH! Yes, this is going to be the only way. I'm going to have to use xmlpipe and write a shell script (or php?) to get every page, wrap it inside of xmlpipe tags and dump it into the indexer. Argh, argh, argh. The good news is I get to spend the next few days at work hacking php :) Or switch to Lucene, but everyone says Lucene doesn't work on Windows, and my box is a WAMP.

Query failed: no enabled local indexes to search
Hi,

Pls help! Sphinx Search Problem - Query failed: no enabled local indexes to search I am able to run indexer in console and do a search in console. i am able to see the results.

i have started the daemon and it is running. When i use Special: Sphinx Search: it says "Could not instantiate Sphinx client. " And then when search for a word : it says "Query failed: no enabled local indexes to search "

If anyone have an idea, what mistake i am doing, pls let me know.

Some details :

Mediawiki 1.15.3

XAMPP 1.7.2

Windows Xp SP2

Sphinx 0.9.9 (win32)

SphinxSearch 0.7.1

Thanks in Advance.

--Ramesh

I have the same issue, any help out there? Using sphinx-0.9.9, Mediawiki 1.16

I appear to have resolved this by moving XAMPP into a folder different from Program Files. --Nate

--193.16.163.244 14:14, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Problem with SphinxMWSearch
Hi, I am trying to use SphinxSearch (Snapshot 80923) with MW 1.16 on a Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10. I included Sphinx Search the following way: But I get the following Error PHP Fatal error: Can not call constructor in /extensions/SphinxSearch/SphinxMWSearch.php on line 22 Can anyone help me? Am I missing another Extensions?

--Jlemley 23:27, 3 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Fixed in 0.8 Svemir Brkic 03:23, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Search weights Problem
Im running SphinxSearch 0.9.9 on mediawiki 1.16. It works fine (at least it looks like). but when the change on my localsettings to "$wgSphinxSearch_weights = SPH_MATCH_PHRASE;" for example, the search stops working (in fact, if i define any value to $wgSphinxSearch_weights the search stops working). - Miguel (20-02-2011)


 * Proper values for that variable are something like:


 * Perhaps you wanted to change $wgSphinxSearch_mode instead? Note that in the latest version you can do a phrase search by enclosing the words in double quotes. Svemir Brkic 03:26, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Call to undefined method SphinxSearch:transformSearchTerm
Mediawiki 1.16.4, SphinxSearch Extension HEAD as of 11/05/2011. Special page sphinx search works, trying to use search on left-hand side provides the error: Fatal error: Call to undefined method SphinxSearch::transformSearchTerm in  C:\xampp\htdocs\includes\specials\SpecialSearch.php on line 127 Fixed, this happens if you declare $wgSearchType after the require_once line this error will occur.

Sphinx 2.0.1 and compat_sphinxql_magics
While testing 2.0.1, an issue appeared when compat_sphinxql_magics is set to 0, while compat_sphinxql_magics = 1 still works. Changes in Sphinx 2.0.1 seems to create problems with the current SphinxSearch (Version 0.7.2).

Testing environment: MediaWiki	1.16.1 (r80998), PHP	5.2.13 (apache2handler), MySQL	5.1.44-community, SphinxSearch (Version 0.7.2). --MWJames 09:45, 18 May 2011 (UTC)


 * That would be an issue in sphinx.conf file itself. Once version 2 becomes more stable, we will update the documentation and default sphinx.conf. Until then you will need to set compat_sphinxql_magics the way you want it. Svemir Brkic 03:29, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Search display behaviour different in 1.18alpha
We tested SphinxMWSearch 0.8 in 1.18alpha (r96396) and recognized that the display behaviour have changed. This might be related to the fact that the search string works now with &profile=all&redirs=1 parameter instead of listing every single namespace as in 1.17. The 1.18 search-URL looks like title=Special:Search&search=<...>&fulltext=Search&profile=all&redirs=1. Also see Manual:Hooks/SpecialSearchSetupEngine and Manual:Hooks/SpecialSearchProfileForm --MWJames 08:26, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I am not sure what to make of this comment. Is the change in display behavior a problem that needs to be fixed? What should I be looking for? Svemir Brkic 03:02, 9 September 2011 (UTC)