Building a custom search engine with PHP

Source: Internet
Author: User
Tags require forum software

Although Google and its series of products almost omnipotent, but the Web form of a powerful search engine does not well apply to each site. If the site content has been highly specialized or clearly categorized, you will need to use Sphinx and PHP to create an optimized local search system.

In the Internet age, people want information to be packaged like fast food: quick and easy to use and divided into small units (or in bytes). In fact, to meet the needs of impatient and demanding information users, even the most common Web sites now require menus with quick browsing styles:

· RSS is a pizza courier who will deliver freshly baked pizzas to their doorstep.

• The blog is a local Chinese restaurant offering your favorite flavor dishes.

• Forums are commonplace (or, perhaps more appropriately, "animal houses" that rob Food).

And search is like having a buffet dinner at a local restaurant: Keep filling the food you want to eat, as long as your esophagus--and your chair--can hold.

Fortunately, PHP developers can find a variety of RSS, blog and forum software to create or improve the site. And while Google and other search sites can do almost anything and filter traffic, search engines are not necessarily well adapted to each site.

For example, if the Web site offers hundreds of new and refurbished Porsche car parts, Google may find your site through a generalized search such as "Carrera parts," but for more specific "used 1991 Porsche 911 Targa HT Bezel "Query, it may not get exact results.

If your site is highly specialized, or if your visitors expect the search functionality to resemble a real-world workflow, it's best to add a local search system tailored to your site on the WEB's global search engine (see "a needle in a billion" for more examples of specialized search). Haystacks ").

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

Visit the excellent Sphinx

To provide custom search functionality for your site, you must have a data source and the ability to search for that data source. For WEB applications, the data source is usually a relational database, with some search capabilities built into it (equality is a simple search operator, like the SQL operator). However, some searches may be more specific than the search that the database can perform, or the search may be too complex to cause an intrinsic SQL JOIN to be unresponsive.

Haidilaozhen

Many sites offer content specific to a particular industry, occupation, or entertainment, such as medicine, law, music, and car maintenance. An in-depth study of the content may require special tools or training, or only a single lasso to generate relevant practical results.

Here are some common search scenarios that require custom search systems:

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

• Find the latest driver for the HP LaserJet 3015 All-in-one printer.

• Find Dinosaur Jr. Take part in the TV footage of David's late night talk show.

To speed up your search, you can rearrange the tables and thus simplify the underlying queries (table and SQL query optimizations are highly dependent on patterns and engines.) You can find various articles and books on database performance by searching online. In addition, you can add a specialized search engine. Which form of search engine is applied also depends on the form (and quantity) of the data and the budget. There are a number of options available: You can connect a Google tool to your network, buy Endeca or other large business search products, or try Lucene. But in many cases, the use of commercial products is a bit of a fuss, or a waste of operational budgets, and Lucene did not provide the PHP API when it was written in July 2007.

As an alternative, consider Sphinx, an open source and free search engine that can search for text very quickly. For example, in an almost 300,000 row and five indexed columns

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