As the creator of ElasticSearch, maybe I can give you some reasoning on why I went ahead and created it in the first place :). Using pure Lucene is challenging. There are many things that you need to take care for if you want it to really perform well, and also, its a library, so … Read more
I’ve been using Solr successfully for almost 2 years now, and have never used Sphinx, so I’m obviously biased. However, I’ll try to keep it objective by quoting the docs or other people. I’ll also take patches to my answer 🙂 Similarities: Both Solr and Sphinx satisfy all of your requirements. They’re fast and designed … Read more
Good to see someone’s chimed in about Lucene – because I’ve no idea about that. Sphinx, on the other hand, I know quite well, so let’s see if I can be of some help. Result relevance ranking is the default. You can set up your own sorting should you wish, and give specific fields higher … Read more