Searching

How to serve up dynamic descriptions for your search results, display the text in front of and after the user's search query and even highlight the words they are searching for. This makes sure your visitors see the word(s) they are searching for and can see the context in which their search term is being used on a given page. Now they can properly determine whether any of your search results are relevant to what they are looking for and you are not sending them on a wild goose chase through your website, or even worse, scaring them off completely.

Before sending the user given search string to MySql, its a good idea to remove common words used in it so that it may not disturb any relevant results you have in your DB. Their are far more professional approaches out there for this task but this simple one helps often.

In a series of tutorials here at Insane Visions, we have shown some of the 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.

PHP has a built-in function to easily fetch meta tags from php or html pages called the get_meta_tags function. It will take all the meta tags and build associative arrays with the name of the associative array being the meta name and value of the associative array being the contents of the meta tag. This tutorial shows how to fetch all the meta tags for a given page and print them to the browser. Then, it can be used to build a search engine that compares the contents of the meta variable to the search_criteria and displays the matching link.

This tutorial shows you how to dynamically compile the list of files in a given directory. You can then conduct keyword searches on the compiled list for finding matching files.

This tutorial explains how to conduct keyword searches on a given Webpage. It basically shows how to count and display the number of times a specific keyword appears on the Webpage.

ht://dig will take care of indexing and searching your html pages, but if you have very few html pages, and must of your "content" resides in BLOBs in your database. You can't do anything useful using a like searchword query, it just isn't coming back relevant. Here, you will find a way to get around this problem.