 <p>I managed to sort this so including the answer for anyone else who runs into this error message.</p> <p>The error: <code>unexpected TOK_IDENT</code> basically means that a field referenced in the query doesn't exist in the index.</p> <p>The best way to verify what's in your index is to run the Sphinx CLI using:</p> <pre><code>mysql -P9306 --protocol=tcp --prompt='sphinxQL&gt; ' </code></pre> <p>And run a SELECT * query like:</p> <pre><code>SELECT * FROM your_index_core WHERE sphinx_deleted = 0 LIMIT 0, 20; </code></pre> <p>From here you can see the fields in the index across the top. </p> <p>I can't figure out why they didn't exist in the index - I'd ran <code>rake ts:rebuild</code> multiple times to no avail. In the end I had to stop searchd, manually delete the configuration file and indexes and rebuild from scratch.</p>