Building a fast semantic MySQL search engine for private articles from scratch

Question

I am working on a project that will involve full-text and semantic searches of articles within the site (if it\'s not possible to combine it,

Answer 1

I would use Apache Solr. I think it's more flexible than Sphinx. Solr supports full-text search and I believe has add-ons for semantic support (like siren). Solr is the serverized version of Lucene.

Solr supports a SynonymFilter: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters#SynonymFilter

This post discusses some strategies for optimizing content retrieval http://www.lucidimagination.com/devzone/technical-articles/optimizing-findability-lucene-and-solr