[gentoo-user] [OT sphinx] Any users of sphinx here

[Harry Putnam]

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.