fulltext search relevancy does not work

knford

I'm trying to get the relevancy to return from this fulltext search, but the variable "score" returns zero every time. The results appear and there are not any errors. I used phpmyadmin and setup and fulltext on the column "short_desc" using an alter statement. I am using the newest version of xammp, which uses Apache/2.0.53 (Win32) and PHP version 5.0.4. Here is the code, which I've reduced to the basics:

SELECT title, short_desc, MATCH(short_desc) AGAINST(\"$search\") AS score
FROM listings

Any help finding the solution so the relevancy is returned would be appreciated. thank you.

konsu

i would start debugging by echoing the actual query that is being passed to the sql server.

knford

Thank you for the reponse. I did print out the sql query and ran it in phpmyadmin. The query returned the matching records, but the column "score" returned a value of zero.

konsu

quote from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/fulltext-search.html:

Such a technique works best with large collections (in fact, it was carefully tuned this way). For very small tables, word distribution does not adequately reflect their semantic value, and this model may sometimes produce bizarre results. For example, although the word ``MySQL'' is present in every row of the articles table, a search for the word produces no results:

mysql> SELECT * FROM articles WHERE MATCH (title,body) AGAINST ('MySQL');
Empty set (0.00 sec)

might this be the case?

knford

thank you for finding that explanation. I'll try increasing the number of records in the table.

knford

There were too few records in the table for the fulltext to compare and assign a relevancy value. You need at least a dozen records. Thank you!