New on the Content with Style blog today there's this tutorial looking at full-text searching combining Xapian and PHP to replace the slower full-text methods in something like a MySQL database.

Sometimes MySQL just isn't quick enough. Especially when it comes to fulltext searches. Everything needs to be indexed correctly, and if we're using different fields with different weights for a relevance percentage, things get very complicated quickly. Xapian to the rescue.

The Xapian library can be compiled and installed as a binding for your PHP installation. He includes some sample scripts to get you started - the SQL to build the table, a Xapian wrapper class, and three simple PHP scripts to search for, view and delete records. Some sample results are also included.