Question

I’m trying to write a search script for my website. And i’m having two issues to battle with.

1) In a situation whereby the user types a sentence in the search box, how can I handle that? Should I just go on and take it like a single string and search for it in my desired table? If I do wont it affect the effectiveness of the website.? And most time return no result..

2) If i’m to search in several tables how can I acheive this.

Thanks for you time and patience.

Example:

Assuming i have the following tables in my db

 about Table 
     about_id
     about_head
     about_content
     about_tags
     about_created


 about_cs Table 
     about_cs_id
     about_cs_head
     about_cs_content
     about_cs_tags
     about_cs_created


 home Table 
     home_id
     home_head
     home_content
     home_tags
     home_created

I’m planning to have different criteria for the users to base their search on..

Search By Date: ( Date picker… Date will be queried against the date a particular article was created. In all the tables )

Search by Tags: ( A single (one or two) word search to search all the tables with a tag column in it )

Search Main Article: ( this is where the user will be allowed to enter any type of search query (string) and it’ll be search for in the all the tables that have a content field in it )

So if the User enters a word like “The Most Famous Church In South Bend”….
Do I just search for thw whole string

   LIKE % ' .$searchString. ' % 

or is there a way I can break it down and search for each word seperately?

Answer 1

Information is not clear enough. I am assuming you need site wide search.

In that case, I would suggest you to go with php lucene implementation Zend_Lucene

[EDIT]
Since you have to search very few tables, I would suggest you to go with full text search.
here is very good tutorial to move on.
http://devzone.zend.com/26/using-mysql-full-text-searching/