Question

I’m creating a site that allows users to submit quotes. How would I go about creating a (relatively simple?) search that returns the most relevant quotes?

For example, if the search term was ‘turkey’ then I’d return quotes where the word ‘turkey’ appears twice before quotes where it only appears once.

(I would add a few other rules to help filter out irrelevant results, but my main concern is that.)

Answer 1

Everyone is suggesting MySQL fulltext search, however you should be aware of a HUGE caveat. The Fulltext search engine is only available for the MyISAM engine (not InnoDB, which is the most commonly used engine due to its referential integrity and ACID compliance).

So you have a few options:

1. The simplest approach is outlined by Particle Tree. You can actaully get ranked searches off of pure SQL (no fulltext, no nothing). The SQL query below will search a table and rank results based off the number of occurrences of a string in the search fields:

SELECT     SUM(((LENGTH(p.body) - LENGTH(REPLACE(p.body, 'term', '')))/4) +         ((LENGTH(p.body) - LENGTH(REPLACE(p.body, 'search', '')))/6))     AS Occurrences FROM     posts AS p GROUP BY     p.id ORDER BY     Occurrences DESC 

edited their example to provide a bit more clarity

Variations on the above SQL query, adding WHERE statements (WHERE p.body LIKE ‘%whatever%you%want’), etc. will probably get you exactly what you need.

2. You can alter your database schema to support full text. Often what is done to keep the InnoDB referential integrity, ACID compliance, and speed without having to install plugins like Sphinx Fulltext Search Engine for MySQL is to split the quote data into it’s own table. Basically you would have a table Quotes that is an InnoDB table that, rather than having your TEXT field ‘data’ you have a reference ‘quote_data_id’ which points to the ID on a Quote_Data table which is a MyISAM table. You can do your fulltext on the MyISAM table, join the IDs returned with your InnoDB tables and voila you have your results.

3. Install Sphinx. Good luck with this one.

Given what you described, I would HIGHLY recommend you take the 1st approach I presented since you have a simple database driven site. The 1st solution is simple, gets the job done quickly. Lucene will be a bitch to setup especially if you want to integrate it with the database as Lucene is designed mainly to index files not databases. Google custom site search just makes your site lose tons of reputation (makes you look amateurish and hacked), and MySQL fulltext will most likely cause you to alter your database schema.