[BNM] Suggest in search - way of doing with MySQL?

[Mark Ng]

Oh, one extra bonus - mySQL full text searching algorithms can
sometimes be quite slow (depending on the search).  If you're working
on a large (traffic wise) site, externalising the search into Lucene
is 1) faster and 2) means you can take the weight of search away from
the DB (which is the hardest thing to parallellize.)

2008/10/2 Mark Ng <mark at markng.me.uk>:
> First, I'd suggest indexing whatever it is you need to index with some
> form of Lucene implementation (Zend has one for PHP).  The mysql full
> text indexing is useful in some situations, but it requires myISAM
> tables (which aren't always the best move) and Full-Text indexing is a
> pain when you have to search across multiple fields and even more so
> across multiple tables.  Lucene indexing allows you to prioritise
> certain fields (so, for example, you can automatically weight words in
> a title field), and does a much better job of relevancy searching.
>
> You can then use levenshtein (as suggested elsewhere) distances to
> suggest other words from the index if you want to, but Lucene has this
> fuzzy matching already built in, so if you add a tilde to the search
> query, it'll use those techniques to do this automatically for you.
>
> HTH,
>
> Mark
>
> 2008/10/2 Paul Silver <paul at tenpastmidnight.com>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm making a search within a database driven site soon. We'd like to be
>> able to suggest corrections or just show results for the suggestions if
>> nothing is returned from a straight search.
>>
>> E.g. visitor searches for "bananas in pijamas"
>>
>> Results say: "No results for 'bananas in pijamas', would you like to
>> search for 'banans in pyjamas'"
>>
>> Is there an easy way of doing this with PHP 5 & MySQL 5?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Paul
>> --
>>  Paul Silver - tel: 01273 906020 or mobile: 07813 654285
>>  Web Development: http://www.paulsilver.co.uk
>>  Search Engine Promotion: http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk
>>  Check your web pages: http://www.spidertest.com
>>
>> --
>>
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