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    Advertising (learn more)

    Advertise virtually anything here, with CPM banner ads, CPM email ads and CPC contextual links. You can target relevant areas of the site and show ads based on geographical location of the user if you wish.

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  • Why Replace vBulletin's Database Search?
    If you are asking that question, chances are you don't need to. If the search system built into vBulletin 4 works well for you, keep using it. Generally, it's something that a forum owner should start thinking about ~500,000 posts, and arguably around 1,000,000 posts it becomes a necessity. vBulletin's default database search is based on MySQL FULLTEXT search. MySQL FULLTEXT search works, but it's not designed to scale well.

    Why Did We Make This?
    We were an early adopter of vBulletin 4 and our test environment didn't test real-world use of the search function properly. Because of this, our site was barely usable and we ended up needing to disable search completely after upgrading to vBulletin 4 (we had around 12,000,000 posts at the time). While evaluating our options, we decided to just build our own search replacement based on the extremely fast open source Sphinx search engine. The developers of vBulletin eventually released their own Sphinx-based search, but it was after we already made ours, and as it turns out, the one we made was quite a bit better, so we stuck with ours.

    We decided to release ours for other site owners to use ~4 months after we created it (after some pestering from other site owners for it.. heh)

    Performance & Scalability
    Sphinx is the system that very high traffic sites use to handle searching (it can handle millions of searches per day across billions of documents) without any problems. Sites like Craigslist, Slashdot and WordPress all use Sphinx for their search. Offloading searches from your database will lead to far less database resources required to run your site/forum.

    A rough example of how much resources the default search uses, it took nearly 5 days to index 12M posts with the vB database search. The exact same content took 18 minutes to index with our Sphinx system.

    Large indexes can be automatically split into multiple segments so each segment can be searched at the same time to exponentially speed up searches.

    The system supports word stemming (for example if you search for "trucks" it will give results with variations such as the non-plural version ("truck").

    If you run multiple sites, our system will work just fine with multiple forums with a single Sphinx searchd as a backend. You can even include your own static Sphinx config file if you use Sphinx for other unrelated things.

    New Content Types
    In addition to all the normal vBulletin content types, we added support for 8 more searchable content types...
    • Users - will return results based on anything about the user (any custom fields, signatures, emails they ever used, etc.)
    • User Notes - available to mods/admins
    • Private Messages - users can search through their own private messages
    • FAQs - anything in your FAQ section becomes universally searchable
    • Albums - if your users have photo albums, they become searchable
    • Pictures - pictures within user photo albums
    • Picture Comments - comments left for pictures within albums
    • Article Comments - comments left for article/CMS comments become searchable
    We also extended existing content types to support IP address searches, so you can easily find anything done by an IP address.

    How Much Does It Cost?
    It's free for premium members. If you aren't a premium member, you can become one for $25. Premium members get upgrades and support as well.

    What Are The System Requirements?
    You must have a server running Sphinx 0.9.9 or later (it's free). You can find installation instructions here. Please have Sphinx up and running on your server BEFORE you try to install our system.

    It works with vBulletin 4.0 or higher and it's a drop-in replacement for vBulletin's database search so it requires no file or template edits.

    Installation Instructions
    You can find them over here (in the support section available to premium members)... https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/installation-instructions-changelog.2628794/

    sphinx_compare.png
    1. RedFoxy
      Not bad, fast and useful
      by ,
    2. 1QuickSI
      One of those add-ons that is a must have and you should never run a VB site without!
      by ,
    3. JordanLN
      Fast, simple and a must have if you want a search function that actually works like a charm!
      by ,
    4. JVS3
      A must have for any vBulletin users with a large site! This is the best way to search your forums!
      by ,
    5. BeoR
      Awesome product. Without it, our servers would crawl to death. A must have for every Large vBulletin Powered Forums.
      by ,
    6. asabet
      This product delivers what it says it will deliver. 100%. Support provided was incredible. I am basically a complete noob, and digitalpoint was incredibly responsive in helping me to get this up and running. I really appreciate that. Be warned, though, that if you are a noob and generally unaware of how to install things in Linux, the degree of difficulty here is high.
      by ,
    7. Peter Camamis
      I have not had the time to evaluate the product as much as I would like to, but it appears as though it is as good or even better than the description. Support staff at vbulletin claim its a good product, and that says a lot to me coming from a company with their own implementation. I did have a few hours of tweaking around the package of searchd to work with the product, but I imagine those coming from non-BSD operating systems might not have that burden.
      by ,
    8. JuPo
      Great product.
      by ,
    9. MElrafei
      need to know Installation Instructions about sphinx-search but I do not have permission to view this page goo.gl/JCmnWq plz i need to any documentation about how can i install it on vbulletin ? and how can i know that the Plugin (sphinx) work with the service ( sphinx ) on my server and vb together ?
      by ,
    10. Highlander29
      I highly recommend this product. It is a LOT faster than native VBulletin search and offers much better options for searching. The option to search through your private messages is excellent as well.
      by ,
    11. Marco Wyrsch
      Works great, fast and easy
      by ,
    12. tavenger5
      Excellent search engine - something that should have came with vbulletin to begin with.
      by ,
    13. KevlarMPowered
      Great product... my forum wouldn't work without it.
      by ,
    14. URLJet
      The Only choice for large databases.
      by ,
    15. minstrel
      Takes a little research and some basic command line SSH skills to install and configure but once you get this working is lightyears beyond the basic vBulletin search. Well worth the time, effort, and money, and Shawn's support for the product is excellent.
      by ,
    16. xrvel
      Awesome product
      by ,
    17. joeychgo
      Shawn is always great! On top of everything!
      by ,
    18. Arikahun
      It is a really great modification :) it is super fast and works way better then VB mysql full text search, not to mention its nightmare of rebuilding the search index if you have a large forum.
      by ,
    19. Bat21
      Blisteringly quick, Sphinx Search took 7 minutes to index 3 million posts while the forum was still live..... an excellent product. The built in search in vB4 took just over 24 hours to do the same thing, and that was with the forum closed due to the amount of resource drain it was causing.
      by ,
    20. MexicanPass
      This product has helped me a lot to my community, I recommend it.
      by ,
    21. MentaLRZ
      Fast, furious and overall would recommend.
      by ,
  • Filename
    Version
    Size
    Downloads
    Upload Date
    1. 1.2.9
      86.8 KB
      333
      Jan 19, 2015
    2. 1.2.8
      86.9 KB
      247
      Dec 18, 2013
    3. 1.2.7
      86.7 KB
      126
      Oct 16, 2013
    4. 1.2.6
      86.7 KB
      99
      Aug 21, 2013
    5. 1.2.5
      86.5 KB
      202
      Feb 22, 2013
    6. 1.2.4
      85.6 KB
      58
      Jan 20, 2013