So I've been working with Sphinx a lot over the last few months for several different projects, including Codaset. It's an amazing piece of software, and solves the myriad of problems when trying to implement any kind of full text or intensive searches.

But, it's still not had a final release yet, as we are at 0.9.9. Which means that there may be some things missing or incomplete from the API. One thing I was missing was a way to find or add weight to exact matches. I can do phrase matching by enclosing the search string in quotes. But that returns all docs which include any or all of that phrase, which is fine, as I want to see all of them. But what I want to do is make sure that the exact matches are listed first, or are given increased weighting. And right now, that is not the case.

So I had a think, and came up with the idea of including a new SELECT item in my Sphinx index. So we have something like this:

SELECT CONCAT('__START__ ', my_field, ' __END__') AS exact_matched_field FROM table;

And now I can run the following Sphinx search, which will match my full and exact search string:

  @exact_matched_field "__START__ my value __END__"