Have a big website with millions of records? Is MySQL full-text search letting you down? Sphinx search http://sphinxsearch.com by Andrew Aksyonoff is probably gonna solve your problems. It is an awesome product (and yes it’s open source) with less than a second search results on a data set with millions of records.
I had the opportunity to author a sphinx based search engine for vBulletin. We use it for our huge forums at Internet Brands. A demo can be viewed here:
- Honda-tech.com (35+ million records)
- CorvetteForum
- FlyerTalk