The Wall Street Journal recently helped celebrate ten years of blogging. It's been quite a ride and the blogosphere has written a boatload of posts during that time. While all of this content is worthy of celebration, trying to search through all of this content has become a chore. That's where the Sphinx comes in.

While Movable Type's search function has kept us going all these years, we knew it could be better. When we got a tip about a new search appliance for MySQL databases (created by MySQL developers, no less), it seemed like a good time to speed things up.

Before beginning development, the Sphinx blew us away. It was able to return 14k results from billions of records in .7 seconds (check it out at LJ Seek). We've since installed it on several clients' sites and the difference is night and day. Searches that would take half a minute now return results faster that the browser can render the HTML.

While the licensing has yet to be worked out, we will be offering the plugin in an appropriate flavor of free. In fact, you download the plugin now from our plugins page and look for help in our forums. Keep in mind that the plugin is still in its very early stages, so we can't guarantee performance or stability, but it has been deployed on some very high-profile, high-traffic sites.

Happy searching!