xapian

Due to a licensing issue, the PHP bindings for Xapian were removed from Debian Squeeze.

Update 2012-01-17: this article is quite old now and it might be completely irrelevant. It is only provided as a hint which might help you out writing a procedure in PHP to manage indexing. As Olly Betts (main developer of Xapian) commented below, the error message doesn't come directly from Xapian either, but it might be coming from some of the things built on top.

While on part-time holidays from Dokeos, I'm looking into some of the stuff I will need to be aware of when working on Dokeos for the next year.

Xapian is one of the indexation/search engines I'm planning on integrating to Dokeos instead of the current indexation/search engine that we have at the moment: MnoGoSearch. There are many reasons for that change:

• MnoGoSearch server is not GPL under Window, which makes it impossible for us to ship as part of Dokeos
• MnoGoSearch has crappy support mailin-lists
• MnoGoSearch's packages in various distributions are not maintained
• Xapian has *many* interfaces in many languages, all regularly maintained.

This article was first written in March 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/215).

Probably the best reference about Searching Engines: http://www.searchtools.com/tools/ Of special interest in the Open Source market:

• ht://Dig
• mnoGoSearch
• Apache Lucene