Fulltext search engines for mediawiki: Solr vs Sphinx

I tried out both on our companies mediawiki instance.

Both provide much better search results then the default Mediawiki search.  Here are my thoughts…

Sphinx

Was slightly easier to setup.  Doesn’t include wiki tags in the search results.  Documentation was better.  Properly 

SOLR (lucene)

Prefered the search results.  I think it gives better weighting to title matches.  In my case, solr was already installed on my box (used a bitnami stack).  Documentation wasn’t as good.  My contractor had to email developer for a couple things.  Other pro is there are more tutorials for getting other information into SOLR then their are sphinx.  In my case I’m going to be indexing my mediawiki instance plus my knowledgebase so this made it a no brainer for me.

I plan on figuring out how to strip the mediawiki tags out and get it to highlight the keyword matches.  I’ll post back when I do. 

Here’s some screenshots: