Searchlight
A few reasons why you should turbocharge your site with Searchlight:
- allow truly efficient use of web resources
- drastically reduce the server load and purge table locks
- eliminate heavy MySQL queries in your PHP applications
- save money allocated to hardware
- make users happy by providing a responsive site
Searchlight is composed of two parts, the standard API and SQL binary network protocol interface.
Searchlight API
Searchlight is basically a software that allows you to interface your PHP application with Sphinx, using an advanced API. It also allows you to execute and replace MySQL queries, using currently unused resources on your server. Is like adding a second MySQL server and takes advantage of the free resources that sit there and consume electricity while producing nothing useful. So when you perform a query with Searchlight, not only that you perform it 100 times faster but you don’t put any strain on your MySQL server, while liberating resources and completely eliminating table locks.
Highlights:
- uses available free resources, eliminating the need to add an additional server
- completely independent, can be used with any PHP5 and MySQL5 software
- controls Sphinx daemon through an API and SQL interface
- produces results up to 1000 times faster then an MySQL query
- developer friendly, you can easily create a myriad of additional products
Searchlight Search for vBulletin
Searchlight Search is a product directly dependent on Searchlight platform. It was created as a software implementation example that involves no template or file edits and demonstrates how easy it is to implement Searchlight, not only for the regular search but also for similar threads, new posts, user profile, tags, etc.
Highlights:
- requires no file edits or template changes
- no server load increase, based on 40mil posts forum tests
- multi-processor usage of your indexed data
- does not interfere with another Searchlight Search product installed on a different forum, while on the same server (multiple installs)
- live index updates, edited/deleted post/thread title/content is updated almost instantly
- no nightly index rebuilds needed, reducing considerably the IO
- built-in failsafe, in case the search daemon fails, search turns off automatically
- replaces all search related functions at global level
- replaces the similar threads queries
- replaces all tag related queries
- search logs, to track eventual errors
- keyword logs, to track what your users are searching for
- search status
There are many more features that are technical and would take me hours to explain. For example, you can display the highlighted search results as excerpts, on the search results page, the same way Google shows it now (keywords in bold). Once my new website is finished, I will have all those features properly highlighted.
A direct benefit of Live Index Updates is the post content accuracy. Let’s presume an user posts a new thread. Two days later, a moderator reads it and deletes half of post contents. The search index related to that edited post will be updated within few minutes. Without the update, the post will be displayed into search results, even if it does not contain anymore the related keywords previously deleted by moderator.
But the beauty of Searchlight is not just offering a search alternative. It is the easiness you can implement new features into your existing software. For example, I will create a free plugin for Searchlight clients, to show them how easy is to add side column on the forumhome page, that will contain the following information:
- latest threads
- unanswered threads
- user’s discussion that he participated in
- most active users
All the above will be done using the SLSQL queries, MySQL is not involved in any way.
Feel free to visit the forums and read more about the background work done.