Can I identify matched terms when searching with sphinx?

Question

I am using sphinx to do full text search on a mysql database through thinking sphinx.

I would like to highlight the matched terms in the results I show to the user.

Shpinx is smart enough that searching for 'botulism' will match "i like to inject botulinum into my eyes"

How can I get it to tell me that 'botulinum' matches 'botulism'?

Answer 1

First, I'm heavily using sphinx for one of my project but I'm not using ThinkingSphinx since the config file we use is quite complex, I'm using a customized act_as_sphinx plugin.

To answer your question from pure sphinx point of view :

• there is an a BuildExcerpts api in sphinx to get excerpt of a content with matching underlined see http://www.sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#api-func-buildexcerpts.
  Thinking Sphinx should provide this functionnality

• to match botulism as botulinum you should compile sphinx with stemmer, maybe the porter algorithm may answer your question : see http://www.sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#conf-morphology

Hope this helps and I highly encourage you to look at the sphinx documentation to fully use this very efficient indexer

Manfred