PHP db search engine, Is it better to use and existing API?

I've been recommended to work with an existing API like Sphider, but I'm having trouble understanding how to configure it and what the hell does retrieving values from DB have to do with page indexing (it's n开发者_开发技巧ot a content pages website).

I was thinking of building a simple search myself with MyISAM tables. Does my plan have any downsides or should I outsource an existing API?

You might find learning to use Lucene or using Solr to put your data into a Lucene based index (probably straight from a database) could be a faster solution than relying on the database. At the very least it offloads search from the database that's probably serving the rest of your content and might one day be your bottleneck.