Full-text search with Solr, Xapian, and Sphinx
Tracker Dogs
Full-text search engines like Solr, Xapian, and Sphinx make the daily data chaos on your hard disk searchable – and they even cooperate with relational databases.
Creating a list of 10 websites that discuss the latest Ubuntu release is simple: just use Google or another one of the popular web search engines. But if you host an information-packed website yourself and want to offer your own search function for it, you need a full-text search tool. Full-text search engines have other benefits for the user and developer. If you are building a custom application or DVD, for instance, you might want to include a full-text search tool to put important information at the user's fingertips. Full-text search delves the depths of random or systematically arranged data for one or more search terms. You will want the search results sorted by relevance, and you will want the results in a split second.
Luckily, admins and developers need not reinvent the wheel: Solr, Xapian, and Sphinx are open source projects that index and analyze data. But how do you define data? You can roughly distinguish two states in which the search engines find information: structured and unstructured.
Structured data has a fixed, predefined structure that allows it to be easily recognized, categorized, and processed with the help of applications. The most common form of structured data is a relational database, with data organized in rows and columns that, in turn, are connected in the form of tables. In contrast to this, unstructured data lacks a data model. Such data sets are often so ambiguous that a program cannot simply process them because the data, facts, and figures are totally mixed. Unstructured data is the domain of search engines that can at least arrange the chaotic data semantically.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Gnome’s Dash to Panel Extension Gets a Massive Update
If you're a fan of the Gnome Dash to Panel extension, you'll be thrilled to hear that a new version has been released with a dock mode.
-
Blender App Makes it to the Big Screen
The animated film "Flow" won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 2, 2025 and Blender was a part of it.
-
Linux Mint Retools the Cinnamon App Launcher
The developers of Linux Mint are working on an improved Cinnamon App Launcher with a better, more accessible UI.
-
New Linux Tool for Security Issues
Seal Security is launching a new solution to automate fixing Linux vulnerabilities.
-
Ubuntu 25.04 Coming Soon
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) has been given an April release date with many notable updates.
-
Gnome Developers Consider Dropping RPM Support
In a move that might shock a lot of users, the Gnome development team has proposed the idea of going straight up Flatpak.
-
openSUSE Tumbleweed Ditches AppArmor for SELinux
If you're an openSUSE Tumbleweed user, you can expect a major change to the distribution.
-
Plasma 6.3 Now Available
Plasma desktop v6.3 has a couple of pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve.
-
LibreOffice 25.2 Has Arrived
If you've been hoping for a release that offers more UI customizations, you're in for a treat.
-
TuxCare Has a Big AlmaLinux 9 Announcement in Store
TuxCare announced it has successfully completed a Security Technical Implementation Guide for AlmaLinux OS 9.