MYSQL - Search words in multiple coumns - php

I want to make a search tool for my website.
if i search for a phrase i want it to search multiple columns
for example if i search dewalt drill and the title has the works dewalt power drill i want it to come up.
also if i search dewalt drill and the tile has dewalt and the description has drill i want it to come up.
but all words of the search must be contained in any combination of fields.
can someone help me with the query?
Currently:
{Select * from products where sku like '%{$searchwords}%' or title like '%{$searchwords}%' or desc like '%{$searchwords}%}

If your table is myisam you can create a fulltext index then use in boolean mode
to add the key:
alter table products ADD FULLTEXT (sku, title, desc)
then your query would be:
$searchwords = join(' +', explode(' ', $searchwords));
$query = "SELECT * FROM products WHERE MATCH (sku, title, desc) AGAINST ('{$searchwords}' IN BOOLEAN MODE)";

Your probably want FULLTEXT searching (starting with MySQL 5.6, this is also available for InnoDB tables). You can require all words with BOOLEAN MODE.

Related

Select from 3 possible columns, order by occurances / relevance

I have a table that contains 3 text fields, and an ID one.
The table exists solely to get collection of ID's of posts based on relevance of a user search.
Problem is I lack the Einsteinian intellect necessary to warp the SQL continuum to get the desired results -
SELECT `id` FROM `wp_ss_images` WHERE `keywords` LIKE '%cute%' OR `title` LIKE '%cute%' OR `content` LIKE '%cute%'
Is this really enough to get a relevant-to-least-relevant list, or is there a better way?
Minding of course databases could be up to 20k rows, I want to keep it efficient.
Here is an update - I've gone the fulltext route -
EXAMPLE:
SELECT `id` FROM `wp_ss_images` WHERE MATCH (`keywords`,`title`,`content`) AGAINST ('+cute +dog' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
However it seems to be just grabbing all entries with any of the words. How can I refine this to show relevance by occurances?
To get a list of results based on the relevance of the number of occurrences of keywords in each field (meaning cute appears in all three fields first, then in 2 of the fields, etc.), you could do something like this:
SELECT id
FROM (
SELECT id,
(keywords LIKE '%cute%') + (title LIKE '%cute%') + (content LIKE '%cute%') total
FROM wp_ss_images
) t
WHERE total > 0
ORDER BY total DESC
SQL Fiddle Demo
You could concatenate the fields which will be better than searching them individually
SELECT `id` FROM `wp_ss_images` WHERE CONCAT(`keywords`,`title`,`content`) LIKE '%cute%'
This doesn't help with the 'greatest to least' part of your question though.

MySQL Search String with Spaces Using LIKE

I'm building a search on my site and I noticed it doesn't work when you enter more than one word into the search. Here's the gist of the query:
SELECT * FROM `blog` WHERE `content` LIKE '%$keyword%' OR `title` LIKE '%$keyword%' ORDER BY `id` DESC
The weird things is that when I test the query in phpMyAdmin it returns the expected results. On my website however, no results are found.
I tried replacing spaces in the keyword with %s, but that didn't change anything.
The problem is that LIKE does pattern matching rather than actually search for keywords. You should create a fulltext Index on your database columns and use WHERE MATCH keywords AGAINST column. That will properly search for all keywords in any order and be a lot faster anyway.
I just tried this in my database and using LIKE in the query is more than 66 times as fast than using MATCH with fulltext index. I'm using two tables which are "connected" to each other. One is tags and the other one is products.
So what I did was that I added a fulltext index to the tag column in the tags table and performed the match against that column. The query than joins the products and then spits out some data about the item. That took about 4 seconds with ~3000 products & ~3000 tags.
I then tried it by first exploding the search string by whitespaces, and then imploding the result with %' OR tags.tag LIKE '%. This took about 0,06 seconds with the same amount of products and tags.

keyword relevance PHP MySQL Search Engine

I don't know why I can't find this anywhere. I would think this would be pretty common request. I am writing a search engine in PHP to search a MySQL database of For Sale listings for keywords inputted by the user.
There are several columns in the table but only 2 that will need to be searched. They are named file_Title & file_Desc. Think of it like a classified ad. An item title and a description.
So for example a user would search for 'John Deere Lawn Tractor'. What I would like to happen is classifieds that have all 4 of those words show up at the top of the list. Then results that only have 3 an so on.
I've read a very good webpage at http://www.roscripts.com/PHP_search_engine-119.html
From that authors example I have the following code below:
<?php
$search = 'John Deere Lawn Tractors';
$keywords = split(' ', $search);
$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT COUNT(*) As relevance, id, file_Title, file_Desc FROM Listings WHERE (";
foreach ($keywords as $keyword) {
echo 'Keyword is ' . $keyword . '<br />';
$sql .= "(file_Title LIKE '%$keyword%' OR file_Desc LIKE '%$keyword%') OR ";
}
$sql=substr($sql,0,(strLen($sql)-3));//this will eat the last OR
$sql .= ") GROUP BY id ORDER BY relevance DESC";
echo 'SQL is ' . $sql;
$query = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
$Count = mysql_num_rows($query);
if($Count != 0) {
echo '<br />' . $Count . ' RESULTS FOUND';
while ($row_sql = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {//echo out the results
echo '<h3>'.$row_sql['file_Title'].'</h3><br /><p>'.$row_sql['file_Desc'].'</p>';
}
} else {
echo "No results to display";
}
?>
The SQL String outputted is this:
SELECT DISTINCT COUNT(*) As relevance, id, file_Title, file_Desc FROM Listings
WHERE ((file_Title LIKE '%John%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%John%')
OR (file_Title LIKE '%Deere%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%Deere%')
OR (file_Title LIKE '%Lawn%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%Lawn%')
OR (file_Title LIKE '%Tractors%'
OR file_Desc LIKE '%Tractors%') )
GROUP BY id
ORDER BY relevance DESC
With this code I get 275 results from my DB. My problem is it really doesn't order by the number of keywords found in the row. It seems to order the results by id instead. If I remove 'GROUP BY id' then it only returns 1 result instead of all of them, which is really messing with me!
I've also tried shifting to FULLTEXT in the db but can't seem to get that going either so I'd prefer to stick with LIKE %Keyword% syntax.
Any help is appreciated! Thanks!
I would suggest a totally different approach. Your approach is cumbersome, inefficient, heavy on the DB and will likely be very slow with more and more records added to your database.
What I would suggest is the following:
Create a separate table for keywords.
Create a list of non keywords you don't want to index (like the common English prepositions etc.) so that they are not included. You
can probably find a list of them online, readily available.
When a new entry is added, you split the string into separate keywords, omitting the ones in step 2., and inserting them in the
table created in step 3 (if not already in it).
In a separate table, with a foreign key pointing to the keywords table, associate the classifed_ad to the keyword.
Steps 3 and 4 must happen again if your classified_ad is edited (i.e. any keywords inserted in step 4 deleted from the association table and the keywords analysed again and reassociated with the classified ad).
Once you have this structure, all you have to do is search the association table and order by the number of matched keywords. You can even add an extra column to it and put the number of occurrences of that keyword in the article, so that you order by that too.
That will be much faster.
I had used a script once called Sphider which does something similar. Not sure if it is still maintained, but it works in a very similar way on web pages it parses.
I know you said you had problems with FULLTEXT, but I would highly encourage you to go back and try that again. FULLTEXT indexes and search is designed to do what you are doing, and when the MATCH command is used in the WHERE clause, MySQL automatically sorts the rows from highest to lowest relevance.
For more information on FULLTEXT, check out http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html
Also, pay special note to the comment by Patrick O'Lone on the same page, some of which is quoted below...
It should be noted in the documentation that IN
BOOLEAN MODE will almost always return a
relevance of 1.0. In order to get a relevance that is
meaningful, you'll need to:
SELECT MATCH('Content') AGAINST ('keyword1
keyword2') as Relevance FROM table WHERE MATCH
('Content') AGAINST('+keyword1 +keyword2' IN
BOOLEAN MODE) HAVING Relevance > 0.2 ORDER
BY Relevance DESC
Notice that you are doing a regular relevance query
to obtain relevance factors combined with a WHERE
clause that uses BOOLEAN MODE. The BOOLEAN
MODE gives you the subset that fulfills the
requirements of the BOOLEAN search, the relevance
query fulfills the relevance factor, and the HAVING
clause (in this case) ensures that the document is
relevant to the search (i.e. documents that score
less than 0.2 are considered irrelevant). This also
allows you to order by relevance.

PHP search on keywords

I have a table in a database with records containing keywords as well as other data. What would be a logical way to create a search function that would allow people to search based on keywords, and order results based on the number of matched keywords?
Mysql provide FULLTEXT search options. Check this link mysql full text search. These search results will be sorted according to best match. it also has support for boolean mode and NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE(default). You need to add FULLTEXT index on search column.
Here is the query that will work for you.
SELECT *, MATCH (ab,cd) AGAINST ('sample text' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS relevancy
FROM table_name
WHERE MATCH (ab,cd) AGAINST ('sample text' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
ORDER BY relevancy DESC;

SQL search query like stackoverflow

Like when the user writes the article title in the input field, I want to search existing articles to see if there are similar ones.
For eg.
SQL search query like stackoverflow
I want to find the most relevant articles related to this title.
I know it's something like:
WHERE article_title LIKE 'word'
but how do I handle multiple keywords?
Use a fulltext index, which'd be something like:
SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE MATCH (fieldname) AGAINST ('keyword keyword keyword');
Or hack up the query to look like
SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE (fieldname LIKE '%keyword%' OR fieldname LIKE '%keyword%' etc...)
Of the two, the fulltext version will be faster, as it can use an index. The 'LIKE %...% version will be very expensive, as wildcard search of that sort cannot use indexes at all. The downside is that fulltext indexes are only available on MyISAM tables, and will probably never be available for InnoDB tables.
You need to have full text search for that.
Make sure you are using MyISAM as the engine for the table you want to search on.
Have the following table
Table articles
--------------
id integer autoincrement PK
title varchar(255) with fulltext index
contents textblob with fulltext index
And use a query like:
SELECT id
, MATCH(title, contents) AGAINST ('$title_of_article_thats_being_edited')
as relevance
FROM articles
WHERE MATCH(title, contents) AGAINST ('$title_of_article_thats_being_edited')
ORDER BY relevance
Note that SO refines the list when you enter tags.
WHERE article_title LIKE '%word1%word2%'
will return all rows in which article_title contains 'word1' and 'word2' in this particular order

Categories