Friday, December 25, 2009

Sphinx, search and spamming

Ever tried searching for something on a fulltext search based website?

Each time You write a sentence in the "search" field, the web server most probably communicates with a search engine that priorly indexed some data in which you can search. Some of those sites are social media sites, some are sites in which being higher up the search ladder, can be of some benefit.

My experience is mostly with the sphinx search engine so i'll just go with that. When you search a phrase in sphinx, for example "php is the best", the engine tries to rank the results with the BM25 ranking function depending on the frequency of the words.

So if you have a confirmed sphinx based site, and it can be of some value to be found on some phrases, you can (but shouldn't) spam the hell of the site ;-)

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