This presentation provide the details of what is the problem with WordPress Search and how Full-Text search on WordPress can be used using Sphinx

2. Enhance
WordPress
Search using
Sphinx

3. I’m Roshan Bhattarai
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CTO @ Proshore
Co-author – PHP AJAX COOKBOOK
A Developer and learner
Sometime I blog @ http://roshanbh.com.np
Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin @roshanbh

4. What’s the problem with search in WordPress

7. Problem with default
WordPress Search
• Default WordPress uses SQL like operator
and % wildcard character to get search
result
• SQL’s Like operator doesn’t care much
about the relevancy of the result
• Like operation is too slow in large set of
textual data
• WordPress sort the search result by date

8. Ok let’s improve the
WordPress Search

9. So what’s resolution ?
• Use the MySQL Full-Text indexing and Search.
• Use Full-Text search server

10. MySQL Full-Text search
• http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cjk-fulltext-index/
• It improve the searching speed and result relevancy
by using MATCH AGAINST than LIKE function
• Use Full-Text index
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltextsearch.html

11. Full-Text Search SQL
Example
Normal Like Search :
WHERE (post_title LIKE '%morbi%')
OR
(post_content LIKE '%morbi%')
Full-Text MySQL Search :
WHERE MATCH (post_title,post_content) AGAINST
(’morbi');

12. Pros and Cons MySQL
Full-Text Indexing
• Pros
• Can be used in Shared hosting
• No need to install extra search server
• Cons
• Still slow with very large data
• Not featured rich like Search server

13. And a very good news

14. WordPress 3.7 has better
search
• Please upgrade your WordPress now. Relevancy is
added in the search of WordPress 3.7
• Official Note from WordPress 3.7 release :
Search results are now ordered by how well the
search query matches a post, instead of ordered
only by date. For example, when your search terms
match a post title, that result will be pushed to the
top.

15. Difference in Search SQL
• Wordpress 3.6
WHERE ((wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%morbi%') OR
(wp_posts.post_content LIKE '%morbi%'))
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
• WordPress 3.7
WHERE ((wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%morbi%') OR
(wp_posts.post_content LIKE '%morbi%'))
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%morbi%' DESC,
wp_posts.post_date DESC

16. Still,
It uses like operator of
SQL

17. Why full text search
engine
• Provides more relevant result.
• Uses a ranking algorithm to quantify how
strongly a given record matches search
keywords.
• Fast indexing
• Search is fast compared to default MySQL
search and MyQL Full text indexing
• Allow to use special operators like OR or NOT
in search

18. Popular Full text search
engines
• Apache Solr ( http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ )
• Elastic Search ( http://www.elasticsearch.org/ )
• Sphinx ( http://sphinxsearch.com/ )

19. Why Sphinx ?
• Easy to setup and use
• Good documentation
• Used by many big websites like
Craiglist, Groupon, Metacafe etc
• My personal choice

20. Server Requirement
• Must have server with SSH access
• VPS or Dedicated server is recommended

21. Installation of Sphinx
For Mac ( using Homebrew)
brew install sphinx –-mysql
For Windows / Ubuntu / Debian / RHEL/CentOS
http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/release/

22. WordPress Plugin
WordPress Sphinx Search Plugin
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-sphinx-plugin/

23. Two main components
When installed sphinx, two application called indexer
and searchd gets installed.
• Indexer
This component of Sphinx is used for indexing the
data.
• Searchd
This is a search daemon which returns of the
document id of matched search results.

24. Installation

28. Now setup Cron Job
Note : Delta index is a small temporary index above main index.

29. The boring installaion is
done ! YaY

30. To run indexer and
searchd Manually
• To run indexer manually
/usr/local/sphinx/bin/indexer --rotate –config
/<path of wordpress>/wpcontent/uploads/sphinx/sphinx.conf wp_delta
wp_main wp_stats
• To run searchd manually
/usr/local/sphinx/bin/searchd --config /<pat of
wordpress>/wp-content/uploads/sphinx/sphinx.conf

31. Now let’s look at the
result of all the hard work

32. Normal WordPress search result

33. Search result after using Sphinx

34. Doh! This guy is done
with his boring talk 
Listening to next person is always boring. To make it
exciting you’ve to do it yourself
Thank you!
Any Questions ?