Sphinx Search for Real Estate & Service Providers Direcotry

We implemented Sphinx Search to power search for real estate and service providers directory. The main challenges for the search was its scale and complexity. The directory for real estate had more than million residential and commercial properties listed for all over USA.  Creating a search for address was tricky and we had to tackle a lot of variations for addresses. We implemented search for service providers directory as well. Service providers can be searched form 100+ different categories. This search was location aware and provided results based on location of service provider and the user. We used Geo location features of sphinx search to enable location based search.