> Steve Rapaport wrote: > > Someone correctly pointed out today that it's not Mysql's job > > to be Google, and I agree. But it seems to me that it would be > > fair for mysql to be able to handle searches in under 1 second > > for databases 1 millionth the size of Google. All I want here > > is a decent flexible phone book lookup, not a search engine. > > That may be what you want. But I want a search engine. For my database. I want > to be able to do search of the million records of inventory in our database and > find the items with certain keywords, that are currently available for sale, in > the venue the user is shopping in and within the price range the user specifies. > This is a combination of database and fulltext search that I think is exactly in > MySQL's marketplace.
I think that there are two different requirements here. A database able to handle fulltext searches is becoming almost mandatory, and MySQL achieves this, within limits. They appear to recognise the current limitations of the product, and are working to make it more capable, and that's exactly what I'd expect from a company with good market awareness. However, a full search-engine is a different creature. MySQL is unlikely ever to equal Google. That requires tailored software and data structures, and more hardware than most of us are likely to have access to. MySQL has a stop list, in my view it also needs a "yes list" so that indexing on a closed vocabulary can be implemented easily. The work that I've done trying to implement full text searching (before MySQL offered the functionality) shows what pretty much everyone else seems to have found. Regardless of the capabilities of the underlying engine, full text retrieval only works well with very large document sets. With smaller volumes of text, you only get good results from a closed vocabulary - keywords if you will. If MySQL could be restricted to a list of words/phrases to be indexed, I think that a lot of the performance issues would be reduced but it's certainly not the answer to every problem. Paul Wilson iiNet Ltd --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
