Hi all. I was wondering if any of you have experience with searching through a database for user provided search terms.
I was hoping that maybe I could get some insight into how to better approach what I am doing. Are there any great articles or example classes that I could look at? Please let me know! As of right now, my architecture is to have a primary class, Search, which connects to the database, takes search terms, removes "junk words"and suffixes ("s", "ing", etc.) (both defined by an array). The class runs a query on each word for each field that the class is told to search, and based on the "relevance" of that field (as supplied to the class), points are awarded to returned items. If they come up again on searches for other words, they get more points. Using that base architecture, I then extend the class (e.g. class Faq extends Search) and define "word groups" in the subclass. Word groups act to broaden the search words in a thesarus like fashion (when the search term "dvd" comes up, "movie", "title", "video", etc. are added to the SQL query via OR). This way each subclass can define it's own set of word groups applicable for that usage. The problem I am having is that far too many irrelevant items are coming up. "When is my package coming?" for example returns all kinds of junk because "when" is everywhere in a Faq. I am hoping that there is some internet resource that has a variety of tricks and rules to throw into a search architecture, but I am also interested to see if anyone can give me some of their personal experience and expertise. Thanks in advance! -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php