Developing A Site Search Engine With PHP And MySQL - Conclusion

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In this article we've taken a look at how to create a basic search engine using PHP and MySQL. Although our search engine is fairly limited in terms of functionality, it isn't too difficult to "upgrade" it so that it can be used on a commercial level content-driven site.

Here are some things you might like to try:

• Add the ability to search for Boolean keywords such as "mysql AND php" or "php NOT apache". This would involve searching the $keywords variable for AND or NOT and modifying the MySQL query around your findings.
• Add the ability to span results across multiple pages. Let the user choose to view 10, 20, or 30 records per page.
• Add a ranking system that ranks each article in the search results. For example, if I searched for "mysql query select", and only one record matched for "mysql", then this record would have a 33% relevance ranking, because it only contained one our of three (or 33%) keywords.
• Adapt the search so that wild card values can be used instead. You can represent the wild card values using MySQL's LIKE command.

If you'd like to know more about creating a search engine with PHP and MySQL, then check out some of the links and books shown below.

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