Question

I have a table in a database that has a description of an item. I want to be able to have the user type a search term and return the rows that had at least one match, sorted by the number of matches they had, descending.

I don’t know if this is possible, I haven’t been able to find an answer googling so I’m coming here.

Basically if the user enters “truck blue with gold two tone”, this will be generated:

    SELECT * FROM MyItemsTable 
    WHERE contains(Description, 'truck or blue or with or gold or two or tone')

and have that return sorted by the number of words that matched.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. This table will become very large in time so efficiency is also in the back of my mind as well.

Answer 1

This seems to have worked very well, thanks very much to Gordon Linoff.

SELECT * FROM MyItemsTable m
INNER JOIN
CONTAINSTABLE(MyItemsTable, Description, 'truck or blue or with or gold or two or tone') AS l     ON m.MyItemsTable=l.[KEY]