Fulltext Search with InnoDB

Along with the general phasing out of MyISAM, InnoDB full-text search (FTS) is finally available in MySQL 5.6.4 release.

Lots of juicy details at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-fulltext-index.html.

While other engines have lots of different features, this one is InnoDB, so it's native (which means there's an upgrade path), and that makes it a worthwhile option.

I can vouch for MyISAM fulltext being a bad option - even leaving aside the various problems with MyISAM tables in general, I've seen the fulltext stuff go off the rails and start corrupting itself and crashing MySQL regularly.

A dedicated search engine is definitely going to be the most flexible option here - store the post data in MySQL/innodb, and then export the text to your search engine. You can set up a periodic full index build/publish pretty easily, and add real-time index updates if you feel the need and want to spend the time.

Lucene and Sphinx are good options, as is Xapian, which is nice and lightweight. If you go the Lucene route don't assume that Clucene will better, even if you'd prefer not to wrestle with Java, although I'm not really qualified to discuss the pros and cons of either.

You should spend an hour and go through installation and test-drive of Sphinx and Lucene. See if either meets your needs, with respect to data updates.

One of the things that disappointed me about Sphinx is that it doesn't support incremental inserts very well. That is, it's very expensive to reindex after an insert, so expensive that their recommended solution is to split your data into older, unchanging rows and newer, volatile rows. So every search your app does would have to search twice: once on the larger index for old rows and also on the smaller index for recent rows. If that doesn't integrate with your usage patterns, this Sphinx is not a good solution (at least not in its current implementation).

I'd like to point out another possible solution you could consider: Google Custom Search. If you can apply some SEO to your web application, then outsource the indexing and search function to Google, and embed a Google search textfield into your site. It could be the most economical and scalable way to make your site searchable.