I don't know why I can't find this anywhere. I would think this would be pretty common request. I am writing a search engine in PHP to search a MySQL database of For Sale listings for keywords inputted by the user.
There are several columns in the table but only 2 that will need to be searched. They are named file_Title & file_Desc. Think of it like a classified ad. An item title and a description.
So for example a user would search for 'John Deere Lawn Tractor'. What I would like to happen is classifieds that have all 4 of those words show up at the top of the list. Then results that only have 3 an so on.
I've read a very good webpage at http://www.roscripts.com/PHP_search_engine-119.html
From that authors example I have the following code below:
<?php
$search = 'John Deere Lawn Tractors';
$keywords = split(' ', $search);
$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT COUNT(*) As relevance, id, file_Title, file_Desc FROM Listings WHERE (";
foreach ($keywords as $keyword) {
echo 'Keyword is ' . $keyword . '<br />';
$sql .= "(file_Title LIKE '%$keyword%' OR file_Desc LIKE '%$keyword%') OR ";
}
$sql=substr($sql,0,(strLen($sql)-3));//this will eat the last OR
$sql .= ") GROUP BY id ORDER BY relevance DESC";
echo 'SQL is ' . $sql;
$query = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
$Count = mysql_num_rows($query);
if($Count != 0) {
echo '<br />' . $Count . ' RESULTS FOUND';
while ($row_sql = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {//echo out the results
echo '<h3>'.$row_sql['file_Title'].'</h3><br /><p>'.$row_sql['file_Desc'].'</p>';
}
} else {
echo "No results to display";
}
?>
The SQL String outputted is this:
SELECT DISTINCT COUNT(*) As relevance, id, file_Title, file_Desc FROM Listings
WHERE ((file_Title LIKE '%John%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%John%')
OR (file_Title LIKE '%Deere%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%Deere%')
OR (file_Title LIKE '%Lawn%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%Lawn%')
OR (file_Title LIKE '%Tractors%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%Tractors%') )
GROUP BY id
ORDER BY relevance DESC
With this code I get 275 results from my DB. My problem is it really doesn't order by the number of keywords found in the row. It seems to order the results by id instead. If I remove 'GROUP BY id' then it only returns 1 result instead of all of them, which is really messing with me!
I've also tried shifting to FULLTEXT in the db but can't seem to get that going either so I'd prefer to stick with LIKE %Keyword%
syntax.
Any help is appreciated! Thanks!