YetiSearch

A powerful, pure-PHP search engine library with advanced full-text search capabilities, designed for modern PHP applications.

Important: Requires SQLite FTS5 (full‑text search) support in your PHP’s SQLite library. See “Requirements” for a quick check.

Features
Requirements
Installation
Quick Start
Example Applications
Usage Examples
- Basic Indexing
- Advanced Indexing
- Search Examples
- Document Management
Configuration
Advanced Features
- Document Chunking
- Field Boosting and Exact Match Scoring
- Multi-language Support
- Custom Stop Words
- Geo-Spatial Search
- Search Result Deduplication
- Highlighting
- Fuzzy Search
- Faceted Search
Architecture
Testing
API Reference
Performance
- Benchmark Results
- Performance Characteristics
- Performance Tuning
- Bottlenecks and Solutions
- Comparison with Other Solutions
- Best Practices for Performance
Future Features
Contributing
License
Type-Ahead Setup
Weighted FTS and Prefix (Optional)
Suggestions
Synonyms
DSL (Domain Specific Language)
CLI

Features

🔍 Full-text search powered by SQLite FTS5 with BM25 relevance scoring
📄 Automatic document chunking for indexing large documents
🎯 Smart result deduplication - shows best match per document by default
🌍 Multi-language support with built-in stemming for multiple languages
⚡ Lightning-fast indexing and searching with SQLite backend
🔧 Flexible architecture with interfaces for easy extension
📊 Advanced scoring with intelligent field boosting and exact match prioritization
🎨 Search highlighting with customizable tags
🔤 Advanced fuzzy matching with automatic typo correction and multi-algorithm consensus scoring (Trigram, Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, Phonetic, Keyboard Proximity)
🎯 Enhanced multi-word matching for more accurate search results
🏆 Smart result ranking prioritizing exact matches over fuzzy matches
📈 Faceted search and aggregations support
📍 Geo-spatial search with R-tree indexing for location-based queries
🚀 Zero dependencies except PHP extensions and small utility packages
💾 Persistent storage with automatic database management
🔐 Production-ready with comprehensive test coverage
✨ NEW: Multi-column FTS with native BM25 field weighting (enabled by default)
✨ NEW: Two-pass search for enhanced primary field prioritization (optional)
✨ NEW: Improved fuzzy consistency - exact matches always rank higher
✨ NEW: DSL Support - Natural language query syntax and JSON API-compliant URL parameters
✨ NEW: Query Result Caching - 10-100x faster repeated searches with automatic invalidation
✨ NEW: Enhanced Fuzzy Search - Modern typo correction with multi-algorithm consensus scoring (phonetic, keyboard proximity, trigram, Levenshtein, Jaro-Winkler)

Requirements

Important: SQLite FTS5 required

YetiSearch uses SQLite FTS5 virtual tables for full‑text search and BM25 ranking. Your PHP build must link against a SQLite library compiled with FTS5 (ENABLE_FTS5).
SQLite 3.24.0 or higher is required (for ON CONFLICT upsert support). SQLite 3.35.0+ is recommended for best performance (uses RETURNING clause to avoid extra queries).
Quick check: php scripts/check_sqlite_features.php should report "FTS5: OK" and show the SQLite version. On macOS, Homebrew PHP typically includes a recent SQLite with FTS5; some system PHP builds may not.
PHP 7.4 or higher
SQLite 3.24.0 or higher (3.35.0+ recommended)
SQLite3 PHP extension
PDO PHP extension with SQLite driver
Mbstring PHP extension
JSON PHP extension

Installation

Install YetiSearch via Composer:

composer require yetidevworks/yetisearch

Quick Start

<?php
use YetiSearch\YetiSearch;

// Initialize YetiSearch with configuration
$config = [
    'storage' => [
        'path' => '/path/to/your/search.db'
    ]
];
$search = new YetiSearch($config);

// Create an index
$indexer = $search->createIndex('pages');

// Index a document
$indexer->insert([
    'id' => 'doc1',
    'content' => [
        'title' => 'Introduction to YetiSearch',
        'body' => 'YetiSearch is a powerful search engine library for PHP applications...',
        'url' => 'https://example.com/intro',
        'tags' => 'search php library'
    ]
]);

// Search for documents
$results = $search->search('pages', 'powerful search');

// Search with fuzzy matching enabled (automatic typo correction)
$fuzzyResults = $search->search('pages', 'powerfull serch', ['fuzzy' => true]);
// Automatically corrects typos: "powerfull serch" → "powerful search"

// Display results
foreach ($results['results'] as $result) {
    echo $result['title'] . ' (Score: ' . $result['score'] . ")\n";
    echo $result['excerpt'] . "\n\n";
}

Example Applications

The examples/ directory contains fully working demonstrations of YetiSearch features:

🏢 Apartment Search Tutorial

Complete real-world example of a property search application:

File: examples/apartment-search-simple.php
Features demonstrated:
- Structured content indexing (title, description)
- Metadata fields (price, bedrooms, bathrooms, sqft, location)
- Geo-spatial search with radius filtering
- Price range and feature filtering
- DSL queries with natural language syntax
- Fluent query builder interface
- Distance calculations and sorting

Run it:

php examples/apartment-search-simple.php

🔍 Other Examples

Enhanced fuzzy search: examples/enhanced-fuzzy-search.php - Modern typo correction with multi-algorithm consensus
Pre-chunked indexing: examples/pre-chunked-indexing.php - Custom document chunking with semantic boundaries
Type-ahead search: examples/type-ahead.php - Interactive as-you-type search
Geo facets and k-NN: examples/geo-facets-knn.php - Distance faceting and nearest neighbors
DSL examples: examples/dsl-metadata-example.php - Query builder demonstrations
Custom fields: examples/apartment-search-tutorial.php - Extended version with amenities

Usage Examples

Basic Indexing

use YetiSearch\YetiSearch;

$search = new YetiSearch([
    'storage' => ['path' => './search.db']
]);

$indexer = $search->createIndex('articles');

// Index a single document
$document = [
    'id' => 'article-1',
    'content' => [
        'title' => 'Getting Started with PHP',
        'body' => 'PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language...',
        'author' => 'John Doe',
        'category' => 'Programming',
        'tags' => 'php programming tutorial'
    ],
    'metadata' => [
        'date' => time()
    ]
];

$indexer->insert($document);

// Index multiple documents
$documents = [
    [
        'id' => 'article-2',
        'content' => [
            'title' => 'Advanced PHP Techniques',
            'body' => 'Let\'s explore advanced PHP programming techniques...',
            'author' => 'Jane Smith',
            'category' => 'Programming',
            'tags' => 'php advanced tips'
        ]
    ],
    [
        'id' => 'article-3',
        'content' => [
            'title' => 'PHP Performance Optimization',
            'body' => 'Optimizing PHP applications for better performance...',
            'author' => 'Bob Johnson',
            'category' => 'Performance',
            'tags' => 'php performance optimization'
        ]
    ]
];

$indexer->insert($documents);

// Flush to ensure all documents are written
$indexer->flush();

Advanced Indexing

// Configure indexer with custom settings
$indexer = $search->createIndex('products', [
    'fields' => [
        'name' => ['boost' => 3.0, 'store' => true],
        'description' => ['boost' => 1.0, 'store' => true],
        'brand' => ['boost' => 2.0, 'store' => true],
        'sku' => ['boost' => 1.0, 'store' => true, 'index' => false],
        'price' => ['boost' => 1.0, 'store' => true, 'index' => false]
    ],
    'chunk_size' => 500,        // Smaller chunks for product descriptions
    'chunk_overlap' => 50,      // Overlap between chunks
    'batch_size' => 100         // Process 100 documents at a time
]);

// Index products with metadata
$product = [
    'id' => 'prod-123',
    'content' => [
        '

Yetisearch

Install / Use

README