website search: Mysql fulltext or own keyword search?

[leatherback]

Hi All,

A little advice please..

I am renovating an old cms. Part of this is to move all content into MySQL. I want to add a proper search facility to the website. I am aware of two decent options:

• Mysql fulltext search
• Use a home-generated keyword index table [keyword][kw_ir] linked to a page linker [page_nr][keyw+nr]

I would guestimate that there is not much of a difference (Except for the mysql fulltext search being easier to implement). However... I'd lik eo thear some opinions on which method to use, and why. I know there are a few people with strong ideas about this.. Please let me hear them!

Thanks,

Jelle.

[Roger_Ramjet]

Assuming you are talking about proper amounts of text content and not just a product catalogue or whatever, then I'd say FTS every time; but then I'm a 'tools for the job' and 'why reinvent the wheel' kind of guy. However, if like the fella who posted here recently, you want to search on short words like 'cat' or 'dog' then you are going to have to modify the FTS defaults.
Building your own keywords system would be more a problem of maint. Even if you script the keywords index update for content changes, someone still has to scan the content for new keywords and decide which to allocate.