Free! - How to build a PHP Search Engine

Introduction or a tale of how easy a search engine could work

Five years ago your site may have had five or six pages. However, over the time it has grown and one day you wake up with 2 GB of content, more than a thousand links and no way to sort them by relevance. You need a way for you and your visitors to get information about your services and products faster. A search engine could help you and your site visitors find that precious piece of information on your extensively growing site.

Conclusion

That's all we need. Our PHP search engine is running smoothly, fast and accurate! We might add some JavaScript functions from an external file, as well some brief CSS rules to make it fancier and give it a pleasant look. In addition, you may want to try combining it with one of our extensions – Ajax Autocomplete. Once you bind the extension to the input form in the code we have just created, it will add auto-complete functionality to the PHP Search Engine. When a user starts entering a phrase a list of suggested search terms will be displayed. Very nice, right?

Kiril Iliev

Kiril Iliev started his career as a PR manager for a Bulgarian game software company and later on started working for Dynamic Zones - the company behind the zones network.

He has written a lot of articles for one of the biggest computer magazines in Bulgaria - PC Mania.

He works on various projects including PHP, CSS, and ASP scripting and is support specialist at DMXzone.com.

As of April, 2008 Kiril is acting as Research and Development Manager, researching the trends in the new technologies, especially Silverlight and LINQ implementation

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Reviews

YO

November 6, 2007 by siu siu

Very good ! THX

PHP search engine

June 11, 2008 by magda wak

There seems to be a problem with this search engine. In IE when pressing enter as oppose to search button, nothing displays. Is there any way to fix it?

Paging issues

March 15, 2009 by viktor roos

Thanks alot for the guide, great job! Although the paging part doesn't work for me. When i select the next page i just find myself on an empty page. I haven't changed anything but the things i have to change. search.php?search_term=mysql&search_button=Search works but when i turn to the next page : search.php?search_term=mysql&first_pos=10 the page is empty. Any way to fix this problem? I have followed many search engine guides and i find this problem on every single one of them, it's getting really enoying. Maybe it's my fault some how, help would be really nice :)

ERROR!

March 1, 2010 by madeL isiderio

hello! i followed the steps that you've indicated in this *tutorial about making a search engine in php. I do all the steps including the database but when i run it, theres an error saying this Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in C:\Documents and Settings\Personal\Desktop\madeL\connectionstring.php on line 15

what do you think is wrong with what ive done? pls help me coz i needed it for my thesis. plssss...

NOTE: i used POST method instead of GET method. i also used DREAMWEAVER 2004 and WAMMP. plss response. thank yoU..

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