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Matching modes

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Aleksey N. Vinogradov edited this page May 18, 2020 · 3 revisions

So-called matching modes are a legacy feature that used to provide (very) limited query syntax and ranking support. Currently, they are deprecated in favor of full-text query language and so-called available built-in rankers. It is thus strongly recommended to use SPH_MATCH_EXTENDED and proper query syntax rather than any other legacy mode. All those other modes are actually internally converted to extended syntax anyway. SphinxAPI still defaults to SPH_MATCH_ALL but that is for compatibility reasons only.

There are the following matching modes available:

  • SPH_MATCH_ALL, matches all query words;

  • SPH_MATCH_ANY, matches any of the query words;

  • SPH_MATCH_PHRASE, matches query as a phrase, requiring perfect match;

  • SPH_MATCH_BOOLEAN, matches query as a boolean expression (see boolean_query_syntax);

  • SPH_MATCH_EXTENDED, matches query as an expression in Manticore internal query language (see extended_query_syntax);

  • SPH_MATCH_EXTENDED2, an alias for SPH_MATCH_EXTENDED (default mode);

  • SPH_MATCH_FULLSCAN, matches query, forcibly using the “full scan” mode as below. NB, any query terms will be ignored, such that filters, filter-ranges and grouping will still be applied, but no text-matching.

The SPH_MATCH_FULLSCAN mode will be automatically activated in place of the specified matching mode when the query string is empty (ie. its length is zero).

In full scan mode, all the indexed documents will be considered as matching. Such queries will still apply filters, sorting, and group by, but will not perform any full-text searching. This can be useful to unify full-text and non-full-text searching code, or to offload SQL server (there are cases when Manticore scans will perform better than analogous MySQL queries). An example of using the full scan mode might be to find posts in a forum. By selecting the forum's user ID via SetFilter() but not actually providing any search text, Manticore will match every document (i.e. every post) where SetFilter() would match

  • in this case providing every post from that user. By default this will be ordered by relevancy, followed by Manticore document ID in ascending order (earliest first).
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