Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if you want an actually good search product there is always SphinxSearch.
Last I checked, Sphinx had a huge design flaw in that it indexed directly from an SQL database. In other words, your Sphinx configuration not only needs to have read access to the database, it needs to contain the required SQL queries. This tightly couples Sphinx to your application and your schema, and creates serious issues for your ops team since every app change potentially needs to modify the Sphinx config. It g…
Also sphinx as real-time indexes.
You send data to sphinx (when you update it), and its indexed right away.
The original disk-indexes (updated by a batch process is still available)