search engine

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat.

Solr is a standalone enterprise search server with a web-services like API. You put documents in it (called "indexing") via XML over HTTP. You query it via HTTP GET and receive XML results.

* Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities
* Optimized for High Volume Web Traffic
* Standards Based Open Interfaces - XML and HTTP
* Comprehensive HTML Administration Interfaces
* Server statistics exposed over JMX for monitoring

Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2. Commercial licensing (eg. for embedded use) is also available upon request.

Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant full-text search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages.

Currently built-in data source drivers support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL, or PostgreSQL, or from a pipe in a custom XML format. Adding new drivers (eg. to natively support some other DBMSes) is designed to be as easy as possible.