Google-like Search Engine in PHP/mySQL [closed]

Answer 1

Your scenario suggest, that you'd like to roll your own; good starting points for a general search engine would include:

• Software Engineering for Internet Applications / Search
• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by some guys
• If your document structure suggest inter-linking features, you can exploit that in the ranking system, see PageRank

If you want to use an off-shelf solution:

• If your application is web-based, and available to public internet, you really have to come up with a very good reason to not to go with Google Site Search
• Lucene has a port for PHP

Answer 2

If MySQL's fulltext search is taking 20 seconds per query, you either have it misconfigured or running on underpowered hardware - some big sites are successfully using plain old MyISAM searching.

My vote goes for Solr, however. It's based on Lucene, so you get all the richness and performance of that best of breed product, but with a RESTful API, making it very easily from PHP. There's even a dW article.

Answer 3

sqlite has quite good full text search capability (look up sqlite FTS 3/4 - its surprisingly good)

if you want simple a PHP diy approach indexing using up of lots of small files split by a hash of the terms being indexed can work very well amd searching can be very fast even in php if you take care designing it. (the idea is to make a search on a term only need to search a very small file containing terms matching the hash and record id's - you could use bitarray slices to represent record ids if you want to save HD space) .. but doing the indexing of every word for fulltext would be slow in php .. that part should really be done in c

for "Fuzzy" searches maybe look at using metaphone hashes.

for pre-built fulltext tools check out these: sqlite FTS 3/4 (sqlite has very good fulltext search capability!), Sphinx, kinoSearch (kinoSearch is a bit like Lucene but the back-end is c with a nice easy perl wrapper - there is also cLucene but I think thats still pre-alpha)

Java Lucene (or anything Java-based) probably needs a lot of ram to to be set aside to run a JVM - so probably not so great if you are on a budget