Question

I’m making a social website with lots of different sections, like blogs, galleries, multimedia etc. And now the time has come to implement the search functionality. Customer refused to use google search and insisted on making custom one, where results will be shown for each section individually.

For example, if user enters ‘art’, the result should be displayed like this:

3 found in blogs
1 ...
2 ...
3 ...

2 found in galleries
1 ...
2 ...

None found in multimedia

I’m planning to use MySQL fulltext search for this. So, the question is: How do I make such search, so it won’t kill the server if very many records match the query? I don’t really see how to implement paging in this case.

Answer 1

I would highly recommend NOT using MySQL for full text search, it is slow both in index creation and in performing searches.

Take a look at Sphinx or Lucene, both of which are significantly faster than MySQL and which bind quite readily to PHP applications.