Displaying similar users

Question

Is it possible using Thinking Sphinx for it to output 8 (or other specified) similar users? For example I am on a Males profile page that lives in California. Under the Similar Users section it would show 8 other Males from California. It would be a random 8, no specific order. Just the gender and state location of the current user page needs to be the same.

I understand implementing geo distance with Sphinx, curious to how to show similar results based on user information. Does someone have an example of this?

Answer 1

You could take the geodistance approach as suggested by iMacTia - though I fear that may be overkill.

I'm presuming both state and gender are fields in your Sphinx index for users. This is in the context of your controller, where you're viewing @user and want similar users.

User.search(
  :conditions => {:state => @user.state, :gender => @user.gender}
  :without    => {:sphinx_internal_id => @user.id},
  :order      => 'RAND()',
  :per_page   => 8
)

Breaking down each of those options:

• Filter by the appropriate state and gender
• Don't include the current user (the model's primary key is an attribute in Sphinx named sphinx_internal_id).
• Random order
• Only eight results