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up vote 1 down vote favorite

I'm sure this question has been asked at least 1000 times, but please hear me out.

I have written a PHP script for MySQL which is used to search through books which are for sale on my book exchange site. I used this tutorial to help me write a FULLTEXT search script, and it works great, for the most part. There are two real big issues that have me and some of my users cringing:

  1. If I search for a particular merchant by name, say, Steve Miller the script will return all people with the name of Steve Miller, first name of Steve, and last name of Miller. As you can imagine, the script returns quite a few bogus results. It gets even worse with common words in book titles, such as of or the, but it doesn't return all books containing these words.
  2. I have an auto-suggest feature which can only suggest titles when you have entered entire words. For example searching for The Unive can't suggest anything, while The Universe can suggest The Universe Next Door.

Question: Are there any well established scripts or frameworks which allow me to search withing multiple relations in a MySQL database? I can't use something like Google Custom Search, since I am searching though particular relations and foreign key relationships in a database, not the whole site.

Thank you for your time.

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2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I have decided to use IndexDen as a search for MySQL data. They have a PHP API class which enables you to send data which you can specifically format the fit the structure of you database, and use their service to search through specific "attributes" in data you send it.

They also offer nice auto-completion services.

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up vote 1 down vote

It seems like your auto suggest is backwards and it should be producing the opposite results. When someone types The Univ it should return The Universe Next Door - that's what auto suggest/complete is for. And as far as issue #1. There's a certain quiet knowledge if you will that if someone is searching, they will continue to enter in characters until the result they are looking for appears. If in fact they are looking for just "Steve" then they want to know all the references to "Steve" or they are just lazy. If they type Steve Mill, then it should return Steve Mill as well as Steve Miller but not Steve Milworks, because the first name matches but the user is looking for a little more specific than just Steve. They want Steve Mill and because the first 4 characters of the last name are entered and do not match Steve Milw - then Steve Milwork shouldn't be returned.... Make sense?

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Thank you for your input, but isn't this kind of just restating the problem? – Oliver Spryn Dec 22 '12 at 21:30

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