Add pagination to my search engine - php

Question

How can I add pagination to a search engine results page?
I have build a search engine but there are hundreds of thousands of results for every search so I want to add pages to it.
The results of the search engine are outputted in a table.
I have started to learn php and sql recently...
How can I add those pages?
I have tried this so far but with no success:
<?php
$con = mysqli_connect(xxxx);
mysqli_select_db($con, 'Data') or die("could not find the database!");
$output = '';
$results_per_page = 1000;
//positioning
if(isset($_GET['search']))
{
$starttime = microtime(true); //TIME
$searchkey = $_GET['search'];
$query = mysqli_query($con, "SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE email LIKE '%$searchkey%'") or die("Could not search") ;
$count = mysqli_num_rows($query);
// count number of pages for the search
$number_of_pages = ceil($count/$results_per_page);
// determine which page number visitor is currently on
if (!isset($_GET['page']))
{
$page = 1;
}
else
{
$page = $_GET['page'];
}
// LIMIT
$this_page_first_result = ($page-1)*$results_per_page;
if ($count == 0)
{
echo "</br>";
$output = 'There are no search results !' ;
}
else
{
echo '<table class="myTable">';
echo "<tr><th>aaa</th><th>bbb</th></tr>";
$query = mysqli_query($con, "SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE email LIKE '%$searchkey%' LIMIT " . $this_page_first_result . ',' . $results_per_page" ") or die("Could not search") ;
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query))
{
$email = preg_replace('/(' . $searchkey . ')/i', '<mark>\1</mark>', $row["aaa"]);
$password = $row['bbb'];
echo "<tr><td>";
echo $aaa;
echo "</td><td>";
echo $bbb;
echo "</td></tr>";
$output = '</table>';
}
//echo "</table>";
$endtime = microtime(true);
$duration = $endtime - $starttime;
echo "</br>";
if ($count == 1)
{
echo "<div class=resinfo>";
echo '<div>'."1 result was found for '$searchkey' in $duration seconds.".'</div>'.'</br>';
echo "</div>";
}
else
{
echo "<div class=resinfo>";
echo '<div>'."$count results were found for '$searchkey' in $duration seconds.".'</div>'.'</br>';
echo "</div>";
}
}
echo $output;
}
//LINKS to other pages
for ($page = 1; $page<=$number_of_pages;$page++){
echo '' . $page . '';
}
?>
What have I done wrong, what can I improve to make it work?
Thanks a lot for your help!

Answer 1

It is not a good idea to build a pagination from scratch, instead use a lib like this: https://github.com/KnpLabs/knp-components/blob/master/doc/pager/intro.md