are databases picky?

[stumped]

Hey everyone,

I created a fulltext search engine that will search authors of journal articles. It works great; however, it doesn't seem to search for all authors. For example, I can retrieve an article that has authors Jim, Bob, and Susan using Bob or Susan as the search term, but as soon as I use Jim I get no results. I don't know what to make of it. Also if I include a second column to be searched (i.e., year, pages, journal title< etc...) I get no results. Eventhough I converted them all to fulltext. Here is the code I am using:

<?php
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$searchterm = $_POST['searchterm'];

if (!$searchterm) {echo "Please enter a search term."; exit;}

@ $db = mysql_connect ("server", $username, $password);

if (!$db) {echo "Unable to connect to server. Try again later."; exit;}

$connect = mysql_select_db("publications");

if (!$connect) {echo "Unable to connect to database. Try again later."; exit;}

$query = "SELECT * FROM pub_entries WHERE MATCH (author) AGAINST ('%".$searchterm."%')";

$result = mysql_query($query);
$num_results = mysql_num_rows($result);

echo "<p>Results found for: ".$num_results." $searchterm</p>";
echo $query;
for ($i=0; $i <$num_results; $i++)
{
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
echo "<p><strong>" .($i+1). ". Author(s): ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["author"]));
echo "</strong><br>Year: ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["year"]));
echo "<br>Title: ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["title"]));
echo "<br>Journal: ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["journal"]));
echo "<br>Volume(issue): ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["volume_issue"]));
echo "<br>Pages: ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["pages"]));
echo "<br>Abstract: ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["abstract"]));
echo "<br>Keywords: ";
echo htmlspecialchars (stripslashes($row["keywords"]));
echo "</p>";

}

?>

[sdizier]

I had the same thing try this query
SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE '%query%';

although I understand it is slower. Otherwise, sombody may have a better idea

Slan

[stumped]

will it handle multiple keyword queries?

[sdizier]

If you need to search multiple words explode the serahc string into words and build a query similar to this:

code:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE '%word1%' OR field LIKE '%word2%';

[stumped]

That would work if each word was a separate term (i.e., jim sleep), but for a term like sleep cycle it would not work the way I need it to. Thanks for your help. Your input get me thinking about different things. I think I have figured it out though. I believe the problem is in the MySQL 50% threshold rule for fulltext searching. Anything that appears in >= 50% of the total entries in the table is automatically droped from the results. The new question is HOW IN THE HECK DO I GET AROUND THIS? I have an author with the name Co and now the author is dropped because a few others have a name with the letters co in them and it pushes Co over the 50% mark. AARRGGHH!