How search engines work ?

fabiuz

Hi,

I am going to build a little search engine for my web site, I would like to make it work quite similar to big ones, I mean I want to let users search records in my database in the easyest and fast way possible.

Actually I am using PHP and MySQL,
users type one or more words and than it starts to search using a query similar to:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE name LIKE '%word_typed%'

also I have made a little routine who will add something like " AND name LIKE '%word_2_typed%' " so, it will check for each word typed.

This works but is really limited.

I would like to have something who can also list similar words (in case user makes a mistake while typing), I like a lot google feature who suggest you which word to use...

So, could you suggest me any web link where I could read documentation and suggestions about ?

Than kyou very much

Fabio

Anon

You will probably want to do a broad search, load the results into an array, then use regular expressions to narrow and refine your matches and rank results.

As far as having a "similar word" search, I think you would need something like pspell to help you with real words, not just random similar characters.

[deleted]

As an off topic thing, i would like to recommend the Alkaline search engine. It is pretty nifty and if you have a non commercial site, it is free. It is a complete spidering, indexing and searching system. Have a look at http://alkaline.vestris.com/

[deleted]

Start by reading the 'slapping together a searchengine' article on this site, that should give you the basic idea.

Once you have that you can expand it to include fuzzy searches and ranking based on previous user's clicks etc.

A forum, a FAQ, email notification, what else do you need?