Question

I have a decent, lightweight search engine working for one of my sites using MySQL fulltext indexes and php to parse the results. Work fine but I’d like to offer more ‘google-like’ results with text snippets from the results and the found words highlighted. Looking for a php based solution. Any recommendations?

Answer 1

Searching the actual database is fine until you want to add snazzy features like the one above. In my experience it is best to create a dedicated search table, with keywords and page IDs/URLs/etc. Then populate this table every n hours with content. During this population you can add snippets for each document for each keyword.

Alternatively a quick hack might be:

<?php
$text = 'This is an example text page with content. It could be red, green or blue.';
$keyword = 'red';
$size = 5; // size of snippet either side of keyword

$snippet = '...'.substr($text, strpos($text, $keyword) - $size, strpos($text, $keyword) + sizeof($keyword) + $size).'...';
$snippet = str_replace($keyword, '<strong>'.$keyword.'</strong>', $snippet);
echo $snippet;
?>