implementing a website search feature using php

[sudhakararaog]

i want to implement a feature where a user searches with a keyword and search results are displayed according to the keyword

or phrase entered by the user.

following are the steps i want to follow. please advice if i am missing out any steps or i can add any step.

1. read the keyword entered by user using $search = $_POST["searchkeyword"];

2. read all the files from the root directory into a variable (as all files will be saved in the root directory)

3. from step 2 filter and read only files with html and php extensions into a variable

4. read the entire contents of all html and php files into a variable

5. compare $search with all the individual html and php file contents from step 4

6. if a match is found with either html or php file then display a brief title and brief description which will be a link to

the actual file which has the keyword.

7. display search results in a serial order as 1. Brief Title of the page 2. Brief Title of the page ...

8. at the bottom of the page based on the total number of results found from step 6 i would like to provide a link to page 1
   page 2 page3 ... (i can decide to display only 10 results per page)

please advice.

any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

[big_nerd]

sudhakararaog,

I would make a strong recommendation you check out some existing site indexing scripts. I believe that google even allows you to "search your site" for free. Check this out Here. Note: it will display ads for google.

The methods you are talking about would put extreme strain on your system.

You will want to write a php script to read all HTML/PHP Files (you can open the website so that the PHP is parsed), and save the information you need to into an SQL database.

You can extract the item titles, and however you will get your brief descriptions, and save it there.

There are existing site search items made in Perl that are free, unfortunately I don't know of an existing project for PHP.

Here is the basic idea:

(background process):

• Follow every link within your domain, and index every page (or if your site is small enough, provide every page in a list)

• Save the information in the scheme as described above, but taking note as to the page it found it on, i.e. home.html found "Welcome to My home Page", it would be saved with "home.html" in one column in the database, along with the data of home.html (that you wish to save) in another.

• Get your POST Variable, and search the database using the keywords, I would recommend researching "Full Text Search" for MySQL or whatever SQL Server you are running.

See MySQL Full Text Search Tutorial Here

This should get you started. Good Luck!