Comments on: Geo/Spatial search using Sphinx search and php

By: Roberto Henríquez

Roberto Henríquez — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:24:54 +0000

I think there is a mistake in the example. Where you say that $_radius is in meters, you probably mean “$_radius is in miles and $circle is in meters”. Otherwise, the conversion

$circle = (float) $_radius * 1.61;

would make no sense.

By: Geo/Spatial search using Sphinx search and php | My Knowledge Base

Geo/Spatial search using Sphinx search and php | My Knowledge Base — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 09:24:00 +0000

[...] In the presentation, Alexander Rubin suggests using Sphinx search for doing the geo/spatial search. I found this the way to go, since I already use sphinx for full-text searching large text tables. Sphinx uses a magic function @geodist for calculation of points of interest (POI) within range. But setup of the source/index and use within PHP is not documented that well. Read the full story [...]

By: Terry Herckenrath

Terry Herckenrath — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:10:27 +0000

I’ve been using @geodist search for a while now with great success, however recently something in my environment must have changed because I now always get 0 results.

I want to use the command line ‘search’ command to see if I can figure out what is wrong.

My question is how do I perform a geo search from the command line tool (search)? I’m having trouble understanding the terse ‘help’ offered by the search command.

Terry

By: te-brian

te-brian — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 05:14:26 +0000

Many thanks for this concise example. While my source is much more complicated, its nice that doing the actual filter and sort is so easy.

By: webpatser

webpatser — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:20:21 +0000

This is correct. Like I replied in the second comment, you need a field with some content, otherwise the result is empty.

This could easily be a fake value. While building the index you can just insert in ‘a’ in a field.

I don’t know when this is fixed.

By: Johni

Johni — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:30:31 +0000

Querying simply id, lat, long results in a empty index when i try this. I fixed it by adding the Field 1 to the field list so it actualy has content to index. It seems it doesn’t count lat and lon as content and thinks the dataset is empty. Has anybody a better solution for this Problem?

By: Bas

Bas — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:40:15 +0000

Does this geodist function search as if it was searching on a globe or is it searching on a flat map?
Or is this a setting?
Can’t find this anywhere.

By: webpatser

webpatser — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:15:30 +0000

Hi Mike,

You can easily sort the results:

Just add

$search->SetSortMode ( SPH_SORT_EXTENDED, "@geodist asc");

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:58:01 +0000

Any tips on sorting by distance? Closest first…

I manged to get this functional in a Codeigniter application I’ve been working on… Just need to figure out the pagination!

Thanks!

By: webpatser

webpatser — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:17:42 +0000

You mean the SetGeoAnchor function? Be sure to really send floats to that function. The sphinxapi.php class is relay strict in variable types.

Also I noticed that if you create an index with only geo data, the search fails. It needs some text field (that is filled on every row), otherwise the search will not return any results. I’ll will update the article with this ‘bug’.