fulltext searching & relevancy

strategies for indexing & querying for a product search facility

[antcook]

Hi,

We're trying to implement a search facility for our product catalog which is stored using MySQL. I have tried LIKE queries, which are obviously not very good, and I have also tried FULLTEXT searching using MySQL 3.xx. The problem is that the FULLTEXT implementation in MySQL 3.xx isn't very good and seems to struggle with the fields & queries I'm doing. So I have concluded that I need something else.

Standard site search scripts aren't any good, as I only need to search titles & descriptions in the database. I need a good relevancy percentage too, to rank the results.

Anyone got any ideas on how to solve this? Are there any relevancy PHP code examples out there? Or maybe indexing software modules?

thanks in advance

anthony

[PaulPaul]

I dont use MySQL, but I have ran into this problem many many times. The best solution I have found, actually IS the like command.

If you build the DB and indexes properly you should be able to return fast results. Also, there are many creative ways to index "memo" or "text" fields. It all will depend on how you are querying and storing the data.