Here are my ideas to make Sphinx search engine to work with Zen Cart.

1, Set up Sphinx

• Setup
./configure && make && make install
vi sphinx.conf
./indexer myindex
./searchd
• Usage
include ( "sphinxapi.php" );
$cl = new SphinxClient ();
$res = new $cl->Query ( "test", "myindex" );

2, Create a denormalized table products_search:

CREATE TABLE `products_search` (
`products_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`products_model` varchar(32) default NULL,
`products_name` varchar(255) default '',
`products_barcode` varchar(32) default NULL,
`manufacturers_name` varchar(50) default NULL,
`category_name` varchar(32) default NULL,
`keywords` varchar(255) default '',
`synonyms` varchar(255) default ''
`products_description` text,
PRIMARY KEY (`products_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM CHARSET=utf8 ;

3, sphinx.conf

sql_query = SELECT products_id, products_name, products_barcode, manufacturers_name, category_name
FROM products_search
sql_attr_uint = products_id
sql_attr_uint = products_name
sql_attr_uint = products_barcode
sql_attr_uint = manufacturers_name
sql_attr_uint = category_name

4, PHP code

See http://www.sphinxsearch.com/wiki/doku.php?id=php_api_docs for example.

Ref:

http://re.search.wikia.com/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-apachesolr/index.html

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-sphinxsearch/

http://drupal4hu.com/node/129

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/dosearch.php.txt

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/dosearch2.php.txt

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2670976/Sphinx-High-Performance-Full-Text-Search-for-MySQL-Presentation

Technorati : Sphinx Fulltext Search Engine Sphinxsearch Zen Cart OSCommerce