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...
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/
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
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/
