How can Sphinx do its sort so fast?

Question

Say I'm looking for a "baby." Sphinx will capture all documents that have a “child” in it, and then sort it using my own algorithm. (ADVANCED mode).

The question is, how can it sort so fast? How does it capture millions of records and then sort them in milliseconds?

Answer 1

Oh, you ask about magic. Sphinx (and Lucene and many other search engines) use an inverted index .

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