Search function

I am building a sim开发者_高级运维ple search facility.

The idea is that it will search the fields of code, title, description and category.

It's quite simple to search for the category and code as it's just one word (%code%).

However, I am unsure how I would break down the title and description to search for any keywords the user enters?

Does anyone have any good techniques for this?

Thanks.

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Given the little amount of info:

If you're using the MyISAM storage from MySQL you can enable FULLTEXT indexes and use a FULLTEXT search over that; see this link for more information on that.

If you're, however, using InnoDB (which I'm also using on my databases), you can't directly enable it in MySQL.

You have a few options; either you split up the keywords yourself and search for entries matching one or more of those keywords and check afterwards how many keywords matched for the ordering. You can also include that in the query, but then you'd need to make a query for each keyword and combine those results with a parent query.

Another option, which is the option I finally chose because of the performance and flexibility, is to use a SOLR server and use the php solr_client (see the php manual on it). The SOLR server will index the database given a few (fairly simple) configuration files and allow fulltext searches on any indexed field. More info about setting up a SOLR server can be found in the manual for SOLR: tutorial.

There are, ofcourse, many many other methods and tools. The above are just a few that I've used in the past or am still using (I'm really happy using solr, but that's something personal, I guess).

Good luck.

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What you want is not something MySQL does very well. Yhn mentioned some options.

MySQL's FULLTEXT indexes are not popular for good reasons.

Breaking your texts down to keywords and forming indexed tables of them that link back to the original items can work. But doing that, in essence, is like starting to build your own search engine.

Much better search engines than you are likely to build are available. Yhn mentioned SOLR, which is very good, but I want to mention also Sphinx Search, which I use. SOLR has some interesting features that Sphinx doesn't have, but I had the impression Sphinx is easier to learn and get started with. It's worth your consideration.