I've been looking for a perl based search tool that uses some kind of indexing to index and render searchable my home library of software manual and the like. Quite a few html pages involved, maybe 15-16,000.
Webglimpse is something I've worked with before and know a bit about but thought I might like to see what else is available. Googling lead to a tool called Sphinx that apparently is coupled with a data base tool like mysql. It is advertised as the kind of search tool I'm after and has a perl front-end also available in portage (dev-perl/Sphinx-Search). The trouble is I haven't been able to figure out the first thing about using it. The overview, and Introduction, like a lot of such documents fails to give a really basic idea of what the tool does. The call it a `full text search engine', but never really say what that means. There are 12-15 FEATURES listed, and none appear to describe sensibly what they really do. The faq is a string a questions about using sql.. really. So far I haven't found a good statement of what the darn thing really does or how to aim it at data. The manual is probably great if you already know a lot about using sphinx but very thin for my case. I've not even been able to get a rough idea of how to aim the darn thing at the desired (Local lan) web site. Or, to show how thin it really is or how dumb I really am, I've been unable to tell if it can even do what I want to do. I've posted on a sphinx list on gmane... but it appears to be only moderately active and haven't gotten any replies... I hoped some one here may be familiar with sphinx and willing to coach me a bit or at least let me know if it can even do what I want to do. Also any other perl based search tools involving indexing and some kind of versatile search query capability.. like regular expressions I'd be interested to know about.
