Build a custom search engine with PHP_PHP Tutorial

Build a custom search engine with PHP

Although Google and its series of products are almost omnipotent, the powerful search engine in the form of the Web is not well suited for every site. . If your site's content is highly specialized or clearly categorized, you'll want to use Sphinx and PHP to create an optimized local search system.

In the Internet era, people expect information to be packaged like fast food: to be used quickly and easily, and divided into very small units (or is it in bytes?). In fact, in order to satisfy the needs of impatient and information-hungry users, even the most common Web sites now require various menus with quick browsing styles:

　·RSS is a pizza courier who will deliver freshly baked pizza to your door.

　·Weblog is a local Chinese restaurant that offers you your favorite flavor dishes.

· Forums are the order of the day (or perhaps more appropriately, a food-grab scene from “Animal House”).

Searching is like eating a buffet at a local restaurant: Just keep filling your plate with whatever you want, as long as your esophagus — and your chair — can hold it.

Fortunately, PHP developers can find a variety of RSS, blog, and forum software to create or improve sites. And, while Google and other search sites are nearly omnipotent and perform filtering of traffic, search engines don't necessarily adapt well to individual sites.

For example, if your website offers hundreds of new and refurbished Porsche car parts, Google might find your site with a broad search like "Carrera parts" but with a more specific search like "used 1991 Porsche 911 Targa headlight bezel" query, which may not yield accurate results.

If the content of the site is highly specialized, or visitors expect search functions to be similar to real-life workflows, then it is best to add a local search system tailored for your site based on the global search engine of the Web (about specialization For more examples of searches, see "A needle in a billion haystacks").

Learn how to add a fast, efficient, open source and free search engine to your PHP site in this article. This article did not develop a visible Web site. Instead, focus on the components required to deliver effective search results: databases, indexes, search engines, and PHP application programming interfaces (APIs).

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To provide custom search capabilities for your site, you must have a data source and the ability to search that data source. For web applications, the data source is usually a relational database with some search functionality built into it (Equality is a simple search operator, like the SQL operator LIKE). However, some searches may be more specific than the database can perform, or the search may be too complex, causing the inherent unresponsiveness of SQL JOINs.

Finding a needle in a haystack

Many sites offer content specific to a certain industry, profession, or entertainment, such as medicine, law, music, and auto repair. Digging deeper into these may require special tools or training, or simply the use of an index to produce relevant, practical results.

The following are some common search scenarios that require a customized search system:

Find all articles written by Joe Hockey about the Stanley Cup.

Find the latest driver for your HP LaserJet 3015 All-in-One printer.

Find a TV clip of Dinosaur Jr. on David's late night talk show.

To speed up searches, you can rearrange tables and thereby simplify underlying queries (Table and SQL query optimization are highly schema and engine dependent. Search online to find various articles and books on database performance). Additionally, you can add a specialized search engine. Which form of search engine to use also depends on the form (and quantity) of the data and your budget. There are many options available: You can connect a Google tool to your network, buy Endeca or another large commercial search product, or try Lucene. But in many cases, using commercial products is overkill or a waste of operating budget, and Lucene did not offer a PHP API when it was written in July 2007.

As an alternative, consider Sphinx, an open source and free search engine that can search text very quickly. For example, in a database with almost 300,000 rows and five index columns

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