Chapter 7. Searching
If you type "Google" into Google, you can break the Internet. So please, no one try it, even for a joke. It's not a laughing matter. You can break the Internet!
WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?
Introducing full-text searching and indexing.
Sphinx searching engine with Symfony.
Apache Lucene with Zend Framework.
Google Custom Search with CakePHP.
With the advent of Web 2.0, web content was no longer generated solely by webmasters and dedicated editors, but by communities of end users themselves. One side effect of this transformation was a huge increase in web content that needs to be stored and occasionally searched.
In this chapter, we are going to show you how to integrate search engines with the frameworks. There are many search engines on the market, but we chose only three because of their usefulness, efficiency, and popularity; we also discuss important differences between them. The engines we describe are Lucene, Sphinx, and the Google API. Apache Lucene is a popular, Java-based, open-source engine that has spawned several successful subprojects. Sphinx was written in C++ by a sole dedicated software engineer with top performance and scalability in mind. The Google AJAX Search API allows you to easily embed web search capability into your website. It is unfortunately not open-source, but it is so cool we couldn't ignore it.
PROBLEM
When you have a small database of a few thousand records and you need to run a query as rarely as once a minute, the search ...
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