Alternatives to full text queries (part1) – Alternatives…(part2) by Fernando Doglio.
Useful pair of posts but I found the title misleading.
From the post:
Another point of interest to consider is that though on the long run, all four solutions provide very similar services; they do it a bit differently, since they can be categorized into two places:
- Full text search servers: They provide a finished solution, ready for the developers to install and interact with. You don’t have to integrate them into your application; you only have to interact with them. In here we have Solr and Sphinx.
- Full text search APIs: They provide the functionalities needed by the developer, but at a lower level. You’ll need to integrate these APIs into your application, instead of just consuming it’s services through a standard interface (like what happens with the servers). In here, we have the Lucene Project and the Xapian project.
But neither option is an “alternative” to “full text queries.” Alternatives to “full text queries” would include LCSH or MeSH or similar systems.
Useful posts as I said but the area is cloudy enough without inventing non-helpful distinctions.