Order SQL by strongest LIKE?

Question

I have the following query:

SELECT * FROM table_name
WHERE (col_1 LIKE \'%$keyword%\'
    OR col_2 LIKE \'%$keyword%\'
    OR col_3 LIKE \'%$keyword%\')
  AN         


        

Answer 1

You can't. You're asking your RDBMS to sort results by rows with the most "LIKE" column matches descending.

MySQL, for instance, does this with what's called a FULLTEXT index.