Implementing a Search function

[jphilapy]

Can someone suggest the best way to implement a search function for our site. We need to search multiple tables, some containing page content.

Which way is better:
1) Allow visitors to search the database live.
2) Index the contents of the database using another table as the index and allow visitors to search just that table.
3) Some other way I am missing.

Also if anyone knows, what would be the speed and performance trade off between the different implementations for searching?

Thanks,
Jeff

[turrets]

I can't even begin to tell you how to pull it off, but I will give you the perfomrance trade offs for each:

1)This is acceptable with a few users searching alot of data or alot of people searching a little data. When you have alot of people searcghing alot of data, the server will crawl.
2) it would probably be better just to index it with a normal index, because you would have to much redundant info in the database and you would have more tables to manage and update.
3)Maybe creat a database that just includes keywords for each of the pages.. this one sucks because you have to think of keywords for each of the pages and if the suer searches a keyword that you didn't think of that does match your page they will not see that page in the results. You could also do a file text searching.... but thaT HAS A huge OVERHEAD.

the best way would be to create your database containg all the page text of each page and then create a fulltext index on the page title, contents and author (if you want to include that feild).

I know this isn't a great help, but it is a little help. (at least I hope!)

-mark

[planetphp]

I had this problem the other day.... Depends on your situation but all i did was limit what the user could query by way of having a select box instead of the user being able to put anything in... This way you can query specific columns in the table...

[jphilapy]

Thanks for the replies guys. I think that I need to do some more research.

Jeff