Zend Search

IPC07 is not over yet, but my talk is - it was quite nice IMHO, I got lots of questions, and ran quite a bit over my time - but since it was the last talk of the day it was Ok I guess.

I think that my main goal, which was to show how easy it is to start indexing existing content, was acheived and several people came to me and said they thing Zend_Search_Lucene is one killer component.

Zend_Search_Lucene is a general purpose text search engine written entirely in PHP 5. Since it stores its index on the filesystem and does not require a database server, it can add search capabilities to almost any PHP-driven website. Zend_Search_Lucene supports the following features: Ranked searching - best results returned first, Many powerful query types: phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, range queries and more, Search by specific field (e.g., title, author, contents), Zend_Search_Lucene was derived from the Apache Lucene project.

One of the features that sets the Zend Framework apart from the others is the inclusion of a decent search module. Zend_Search_Lucene is a php port of the Apache Lucene project, a full-text search engine framework. Zend_Search_Lucene promises a simple way to add search functionality to an application without requiring additional php extensions or even a database.

If youÂ’re like me youÂ’ve probably followed the Askeet tutorial on Search in order to create a decent search engine for your web app. ItÂ’s fairly straight forward, but they hinted that when Zend Search Lucene (ZSL) is released, that might be the way to go. Well we are in luck, ZSL is available, so letÂ’s just dive right in. If you arenÂ’t using symfony have a look at this article from the Zend Developer Zone. It covers just enough to get you started. If you are using symfony, just follow along and weÂ’ll get you where you need to go.

This article explains how to use the Zend_Search module to search existing current and saved blog entries for a particular search term, and return ranked results. You will learn:
* How to use the Zend_Search module and related classes to index and search data.
* How to perform different types of simple and advanced searches using the Zend_Search module.
At the end of this article, you will be able to search feed entries that have been saved in your feed reader. First, build a function that builds the search index and adds new content to the index. Next, create two actions that will provide the search functionality: search and viewSearchResults. The search action provides a form to perform searches, and the viewSearchResults action processes the input from the form and displays the ranked results to you.