Searching

Before sending the user given search string to MySql, its a good idea to remove common words used in it so that it may not disturb any relevant results you have in your DB. Their are far more professional approaches out there for this task but this simple one helps often....
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This tutorial discusses creating an advanced fuzzy search engine using PHP and a database. The tutorial uses the example of a wiki application, but the concepts can easily be applied to other applications in different languages.

In a series of tutorials here at Insane Visions, we have shown some of the basics of PHP and continue it with how to enable visitors to search your site, using PHP. We'll take you step by step on a fairly simple search feature. From the actual form, to the results and several things you can do to make your search better....
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In this tutorial I will teach you how using dreamweaver you can create a site search. From creating the database to the end with a functioning search form

This hands on PHP Programming article provides the knowledge necessary to design and develop a search engine for your website using PHP version 4.0 and above. Making a search engine for your website with PHP is really easy and provides substantial functionality required by most of the small to medium websites. ...
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A Tutorial on the basics of Full-Text search capabilities of MySql. This technique scale well in performance compared to using the good old LIKE clause.

Building indexers/spiders that can read binary MS Word (.doc) documents can be difficult, expecially on *nix servers, which don't support PHP's COM abilities. Solutions usually involve installing binaries on the server (often impossible or disallowed). This simple PHP snippet makes a pretty good job of extracting text from an MS Word document for use in a search index. While not pretending to be perfect, it has proved itself useful on thousands of test documents....
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In this tutorial, we will discuss a method of searching web pages for keywords. We will provide methods for exact keyword matching and a type of fuzzy search. Also included in this tutorial is a overview of using databases in PHP and a heavy concentration on classes....
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In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to let users search your site, without building a search engine. This can be useful if your pages are all html, or you do not have the time to build your own website search engine.

This article shows you how to use PHP and a MySQL (or any SQL database) to create your own basic search engine. Covers creating SQL tables, Using regular expressions to match keywords, Connecting to the database, and Returning the results.

PHP has a built-in function to easily fetch meta tags from php or html pages called the get_meta_tags function. It will take all the meta tags and build associative arrays with the name of the associative array being the meta name and value of the associative array being the contents of the meta tag. This tutorial shows how to fetch all the meta tags for a given page and print them to the browser. Then, it can be used to build a search engine that compares the contents of the meta variable to the search_criteria and displays the matching link....
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This tutorial explains how to conduct keyword searches on a given Webpage. It basically shows how to count and display the number of times a specific keyword appears on the Webpage.

This tutorial shows you how to dynamically compile the list of files in a given directory. You can then conduct keyword searches on the compiled list for finding matching files.

ht://dig will take care of indexing and searching your html pages, but if you have very few html pages, and must of your "content" resides in BLOBs in your database. You can't do anything useful using a like searchword query, it just isn't coming back relevant. Here, you will find a way to get around this problem....
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This tutorial shows you how to add search capabilities to your site using PHP3 and ht://Dig. This tutorial will cover the following steps needed to get these two great Open Source applications working together: Installing ht://Dig, Configuring ht://Dig, Indexing the Site, Building the Search Page, Performing the Search, and Parsing and Displaying the Results....
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