Meaningful Text Phrase Search on a MySQL Database

[radderfire]

Hi Guys

I am looking for some general advice on how to do a meaningful text phrase search on a MySQL database. I have a database full of text descriptions for shopping products, and I want to build a search function against the database that is as useful as possible.

Let's say I have the search term "green mens jumper".

So far, I am splitting the search term up into each word and then running each word against the database, using a wildcard match in the SQL, i.e.

... WHERE ProductName LIKE %SearchWord1% ...

etc

This does produce some helpful results, but use of the wildcard means anything with the term womens in it would also be shown, i.e. it produces irrelevant results.

I have heard of something called full-text search, and producing indexes, is this something that should be done? I am trying to get some level of intelligent search, but this does not seem like an easy task!

Can anyone give me some general advice?

Thanks

 

[radderfire]

It's for practical purposes. I have a shopping website that has a list of all product page names in a MySQL database, and I want users to be able to search for a particular product. It is quite a general question, i.e. what is the most powerful way to do text search against a MySQL database. I know how to do the basic SQL queries, but these won't give me particularly good results, so how can I make it better? Full-text search is a concept I have seen, but I don't really know what it is. I am guessing it can create some sort of index from the database to enable better search results. I am just after pointers in the right direction. I have been looking for PHP/MySQL database search scripts but the ones I have found are very basic and therefore can't give good results.

Thanks

 

[radderfire]

Are these products stored in categories or are you just wanting the power of finding results due to text input?

Just due to text input. I will take a look at full-text.

Thanks Guys