Article Discussion: Getting Started With MySQL's Full-Text Search Capabilities

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Since Mysql support Full-text Search Full-text Search as of version 3.23.23 and above, is anyone aware of any 'large' serach engine that use mysql as its backends?

Just wondering, what kinds of database used by 'big borther' like Yahoo! Google, Altavista, etc.

Thanks.

I really don't have the slightest idea.. but I'm guessing they've made their own..

Is there any problem if I use this feature in a large scale database?

I think it's meant for quite large databases. Worth a shot at least

I used this tutorial and found it great, except for one question about the "50%" rule....


I have a test database with 24 records/rows

I searched for the word "camera" which is present in 3 rows and it displayed perfectly

I searched for the world "film" which is present in 17 of the 24 rows and it returned 0 results

I imagine this is the 50% rule

how do you get around that? do you send a message back saying be more specific in your search?

do you do an if statement that if mysql_num_rows = 0 do the same search using the LIKE method?

thanks!

Hmm, well.. Since the word film is used so much, there's nothing special about it.. that's my view but yeah, you can do a WHERE columnName LIKE '%searchword%' if you'd like to

well if you're searching an ecommerce site, you have to expect your users to not understand a 50% rule, they want to type something in and get results back, they don't care if its the most common word in the world.

if they are searching for a product they don't know they might not know how to narrow the search.

in a query like:
select *, MATCH (title) AGAINST ('hardware guide') as relevance from articles where MATCH (title) AGAINST ('hardware guide') order by relevance DESC

does it retrieves the results that have hardware AND guide or it retrieves hardware OR guide...

i know that the relevance will be diferent but anyway it looks like it uses OR by default...

but i don't understand this full-text searching stuff.... the way relevance is made is not clear, i can't find an explanation of the algorithm they used.

i guess i will just wait for another nice tutorial: how to make a ultra nice search engine for your website

[edit]How do you display the results in PHP? Also,[/edit] how can you display the relevance beside the query? ie.: MyText (100%)

Thanks,
Joe of 4Life

Hi everyone !



I was just wondering if this article was coming out soon ... I'm trying to do it myself but well i have to admit it's quite messy and working on my nerves ... .

Anyway thanks for the great articles !

Mike

MySQL 4 (currently in beta) supports boolean search natively

What I mean was that I was trying to make the full-text search engine using PHP .

I've got the script running o.k
I can see session files being created in a sessions directory that i predefined.
But my count never increases., I had to change false!== coz it would not run with this

I think that the false !== is not supported in my hosted php server
I have tried a loop like this

while ( $file = readdir( $directory_handle ) ) { $count++;......

but still the count does not increase.

can anyone suggest a workaround


garry

If I understand correctly, searches on words such as 'art', 'ski', 'cat', 'dog', 'car', 'net', 'air', 'old', ..... will never return anything because they are 3 or less characters long and are considered noise words? I need to decide if I should use full-text search for a sport store site search. Most probably, now that winter is here (lots of snow in Quebec), many people will want to search for articles with the word 'ski' in them....

mmmmmm......

thanks
Olivier

I suggest against it, I'm using it now and I'm having problems with that 3 word thing as well.

I have to rewrite my search this month

i'm a newbie in php+mysql dev. I've already read this article, and it's very helpfull.

I've make a search form, u can see it at :
URL

note : i've not yet input data for Provinsi, Kota and Kecamatan, so it's still empty.


i want to use full text search to find the data from the database. I've alter my table in database :

alter table MyTable add fulltext(field1, field2, field3 ...until... field25)

but mysql report an error that says max field is 16. This is the error :
ERROR 1070: Too many key parts specified. Max 16 parts allowed

How can i doing full text search for that such a lot of query/field ?...give an idea or something to solve this problem

thx for the help.