Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

#31

Post by kumiko_studio » Sun, May 10, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

#32

Post by Skinless1501 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 11:57 AM UTC

This looks pretty solid. What's so special about the dotless Turkish i that it's ignored?

Re: Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

#33

Post by asmodios » Wed, May 13, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

Skinless1501 wrote: post #32

This looks pretty solid. What's so special about the dotless Turkish i that it's ignored?

Thanks, that was a legitimate omission. I’ve now added transliteration support for Turkish-specific characters (`İ`, `ı`, `Ğ`, `Ş`, etc.) in the normalization layer.

Re: Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

#34

Post by asphodele » Mon, May 18, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

An alternative for PHP full text search is the PHP DuckDB client [1], and using DuckDB with the Full-Text Search extension [2]. It also stores everything on the local file system and can scale to millions of records.

[1] https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/clients/php [2] https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/full_text_se...

Re: Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

#35

Post by asmodios » Wed, May 20, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

asphodele wrote: post #34

An alternative for PHP full text search is the PHP DuckDB client [1], and using DuckDB with the Full-Text Search extension [2]. It also stores everything on the local file system and can scale to millions of records. [1] https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/clients/php [2] https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/full_text_se...

Thanks for the suggestion. DuckDB is a great tool, but it requires installing a native extension, which is exactly the scenario php-fts is designed to avoid. The primary target is shared hosting (OVH, Infomaniak, o2switch…) where you have no control over installed extensions. If you can install DuckDB, you can probably also run Meilisearch or Typesense, which are purpose-built for search.