Slapping together a search engine for your database is easy with PHP and MySQL

basics of PHP and continue it with how to enable visitors to search your site, using PHP.

We'll take you step by step on a fairly simple search feature. From the actual form, to the results and several things you can do to make your search better.

Compiling the list of files to search through

Miss me yesterday? lol :) I got a few emails saying, "I can't see the diary entry." The reason you couldn't see one is because there wasn't one :) I am going to try and study PHP every day until I feel that I no longer need to study aloud and online. I work some days in excess of 15 hours and have no time to study, so if you see no diary entry, I either didn't learn anything new or I didn't study that particular day. Whenever I write something, I do it in a sense *live* therefore you shortly after I code the HTML and hit save, my FTP editor FTPs these changes immediately onto the website. I suppose I could just add an entry to say hello or something, or ramble aloud about what I ate for the day, but I think you would grade me down on the useful rating scale considerably if I did do that. Who knows, though? I may do that once in awhile. Anyway, the readership of these diary entries is increasing, according to my access logs, and I thank you for tuning in, so to speak. How long these diary entries continue will be in direct proportion to the learning I do, and the number of email requests I get to explore PHP further. Please take a minute and use the form to send me ideas for future diary entries, if you would like to see me explore a new topic, or an existing one in greater depth. I have learned a great deal already and have started several new PHP scripts projects that will show up as full script downloads in the future. With the information in these diary entries, you should have been able to start some PHP projects of your own, as well :)

In this tutorial, we will discuss a method of searching web pages for keywords. We will provide methods for exact keyword matching and a type of fuzzy search. Fuzzy searching enables us to find words that are similar to the keyword we searched for. This is extremely useful when the search for an exact keyword does not produce any results. In fact, in our search script we will only utilize fuzzy searching when we do not get results from a normal keyword search.