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Search Engine Libraries in Titania #401
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Activity
- changed the title
[-]Titania and search engine?[/-][+]Search Engine Libraries in Titania[/+]on Jun 2, 2025 Well, the search facilities appear to be completely broken now - just try searching a contrib's discussion/support forum and you'll see.
The current options are all painful and should be removed IMO:
Sphinx — requires a separate daemon, manual config generation, manual index rebuilds via CLI, doesn't store text fields (requiring the DB re-fetch), and has a 20000000/10000000 id offset hack.
Zend— abandoned for years, stores indexes as files on disk, has a compound id bug, and has poor relevance.
Solr — requires a separate Java server. Even higher burden than Sphinx.
The alternative: a MySQL fulltext driver
Titania already has a clean driver_interface. Writing a new driver backed by MySQL FULLTEXT indexes would:
- Require zero additional infrastructure — MySQL is already there
- Be trivially maintainable — no daemons, no CLI rebuilds, no separate config
- Store and return all fields directly (no DB re-fetch needed)
- Work correctly immediately after any DB change, since it IS the DB
The implementation would be straightforward — FULLTEXT indexes on the titania posts/contribs/faqs tables, MATCH(...) AGAINST(... IN BOOLEAN MODE) queries, results returned with all fields intact. The index() and delete() methods become obsolete since MySQL maintains the fulltext index automatically. The reindex tool's truncate/index steps also become obsolete.
Is the MySQL fulltext driver still the way you want to go with this? I will give it a try if so.
I actually think this issue is no longer an issue.
Reacted by Zi
Hi Team,
I’m opening this issue to discuss the message posted by @iMattPro in this GitHub comment:
Currently, Titania supports three extra search engines:
However, all of these are either outdated or abandoned. Below is a summary of their current status:
Sphinx
Solr
Zend
Let’s discuss how we want to proceed with these search engines. Should we explore replacing them, updating their dependencies, or consider removing some altogether?
Looking forward to your thoughts!