Tue, 10 Aug 2004 15:41:27 +0000

Hello,

I agree with you cmonkey, but andy206uk has an easy way to add relevance to the search results. How do you this? Does anyone has an example to share?

Also I need to search multiple database tables.. how do I do this? Do I need to put my results in an array first?
An third problem, I would like to be able to search for multiple keywords.. Any idea?

Thanks,

Mark.

dudcore.net — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 17:35:54 +0000

I second cmonkey here. Exactly how I'd contruct the query as well. It all comes down to taste and coding style I suppose....

cmonkey — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 15:31:51 +0000

True but I'm pretty sure MATCH will only work on fulltext indexes, here's a little snippet from mysql.com:

Quote:
The MATCH() function performs a natural language search for a string against a text collection. A collection is a set of one or more columns included in a FULLTEXT index. The search string is given as the argument to AGAINST(). The search is performed in case-insensitive fashion. For every row in the table, MATCH() returns a relevance value, that is, a similarity measure between the search string and the text in that row in the columns named in the MATCH() list.

the rest of the info can be found here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Search.html

anyways, obviously there are multiple ways do different types of searches so I would just choose whichever is easier for you to set up, it doesn't sound like you need to do anything elaborate with it.

andy206uk — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 13:08:31 +0000

True... but LIKE just returns all results that meet the requirements. MATCH orders them by relevance.

cmonkey — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 04:37:29 +0000

If you are allowing the user to enter a search term I would suggest using LIKE in your query:

<?php
$query = \"SELECT fieldname1, fieldname2, FROM tablename WHERE $field LIKE '%$term%'\";
?>

Its rairly a good idea to do a SELECT * query as stated above because it eats up a lot of server resources depending on the size of your database.

the LIKE statement will do a case-insensitive comparison between the $field value submitted (the field they are searching) and the search term they enter. The % signs server as wild cards; so if any part of the value stored in that field contains whatever is between the two % signs it will be returned.

you can get more info on mysql.com

hope that helps

andy206uk — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 08:28:11 +0000

You need put the searchbox on a page and pass the $keyword variable to your search form, then simply use the following sql to find results ordered by relevence (like a proper search engine).

SELECT *, MATCH (fields,you,want,to,search) 
	
		AGAINST ('$keyword')
AS score 
	
		FROM `tablenamehere` 
				
	ORDER BY `score` 
	
	DESC
	"; 

Then just loop through the results and display as required. I hope that's clear enough.