I've already wrote a few times about various projects using Sphinx with MySQL for scalable Full Text Search applications. For example on BoardReader we're using this combination to build search against over 1 billion of forum posts totaling over 1.5TB of data handling hundreds of thousands of search queries per day.
The count of forum posts being large, is however not the largest we've got to deal in the project - number of links originating from forum posts is a bit larger number.
The task we had for links is to be able to search for links pointing to given web site as well. The challenge in this case is we do not only want to match links directed to "mysql.com" but links to "www.mysql.com" or "dev.mysql.com/download/" as well as they are all …
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