full-text search question

jadeddog

simple question really... ive been looking at the full-text search option for a project and i have a question about it

from what i can gather, the full-text search only handles one key word, is this correct? if a user then enters "chocolate cookies" in the search, what happens? do both words get searched for, or does the string "chocolate cookies" get searched for? (thusly ignoring records with only "chocolate" or "cookie")

sorry about the rather simplistic questions, but i cant seem to find these answers anywhere

devinemke

this all depends on the query syntax. in mySQL 4 this query...

SELECT * FROM table WHERE MATCH(field) AGAINST('chocolate cookies')

...will search out any records that have "chocolate" or "cookies" or both.

this query...

SELECT * FROM table WHERE MATCH(field) AGAINST('+chocolate -cookies' IN BOOLEAN MODE)

...will search out any records that have "chocolate" and do not have "cookies".

jadeddog

ok, so in the case where it will serach for either or both.... does a return of both then have a higher score? thusly returning a record with a higher score first?

im also assuming that you can also do something like ... AGAINST($user_input)... is this correct? and that ... MATCH(field) ... is where you would put what fields in your DB you wish to search through (ie. name, address, description, etc)

jadeddog

bump

basically what im wondering is that if full-search allows for a user to input "two words" and then i can set this to $input="two words"... then can i do AGAINST($user_input) and have the full-search look for both "two" and "words" or both? or does full serach only work on one word at a time?