Giving your users a tool to find relevant invormation from the vast ocean that is the content of your site isn't easy sometimes. Even with the powerful combination of PHP and MySQL, it can be difficult to find what you're looking for. Wolfgang Drews shares in some of this frustration in his new blog post.
Using MySQL most of you will be familiar with this: searching in textfields for keywords is quite uncomfortable when using other table handler then MyISAM. If you use MyISAM, you can utilise the Fulltext-Search with MATCH … AGAINST. Otherwise you are thrown back to "simple" string comparison functions (LIKE). Not really satisfying. As this won't change with the 5.1er Version of MySQL, i have to search for another solution.
His other suggestions include the use of two other tables (terms in one, references back to content in another) or an external search option, such as the Zend Framework's implementation of the lucene functionality - Zend_Search.
