[WEB4LIB] PHP, MySQL full-text search

[Avi Rappoport]

At 7:04 PM -0800 10/29/02, Margaret Graham wrote:
>We are looking at options for providing full-text search to digitized
>archival documents and a recent article describes how to use PHP with
>MySQL to provide relevancy indexing for full-text search
><http://www.developers-resources.com/stories/02/08/09/2805383>.  As we
>are already committed to using PHP and MySQL, making this work would be
>helpful.

In my experience, it's better to use an existing search engine than 
to try and implement one in a database.  Home-grown search software 
generally gets very bad ratings in my user survey.  Most DB search 
engines perform very primitive relevance ranking, so for example, 
they might rank a record that has 10 matches for one word of a query 
above another record that contains a match to the query phrase. 
Database search engines tend to have problems scaling as well -- if 
you start getting more traffic, the searching can bog down your 
server.

A number of search engines integrate well with PHP, including 
mnoGoSearch, SWISH-E, ht://Dig, Zoom, HomePageSearchEngine, MPS, 
WebGlimpse, and RuterSearch.  For more information, please see 
<http://www.searchtools.com/tools>.  You're welcome to contact me 
directly for help as well, I like to help libraries.

Avi
-- 
Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
    <http://www.searchtools.com>