difference between WHERE LIKE and MATCH

VisionsOfCody

I'm writing a search query using keywords - at the moment the search uses FULLTEXT fields and looks like this :

"SELECT *, MATCH (".$fields.") AGAINST ('".$searchKey."') AS score FROM products WHERE MATCH (".$fields.") AGAINST ('".$searchKey."')"

using that query i get the results in order of pertinence BUT as far as i can tell i can't use the '%' wildcard for searching with MATCH - is that correct ?

if I want to use wildcard searching it seems i have to use

SELECT * FROM prducts WHERE LIKE %bla%

but, as far as i can tell, i don't get the results in order of pertinence

so - is there a way of using wildcard matching but still getting the results in order of pertinence ?

thanks

bogu

MATCH is used for fulltext search, here u can find more about this. [full-text search]

VisionsOfCody

I'm not sure you read the post completely ;-)

but thanks anyway for your reply

dream_scape

You can use the * as a wildcard when doing full text searches in boolean mode:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-boolean.html

There is also query expansion mode, which doesn't allow a wildcard, but may still give better results than the default mode:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-query-expansion.html

VisionsOfCody

ok thanks - i'll check out those links