Creating a Search Application

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.



In order to create the search application, we will need to tackle four distinct tasks. First, we need to create the tables in the database. This is where we will store the information we will search. Second, we will need to gather the keywords and store them in the tables we created. Next, we will develop an exact keyword-matching search. Finally, we will develop a way to do fuzzy searching.



Before we build our search application, however, we need to look an aspect of PHP that we have not touched upon yet. In order to make our search application effective, we will need to utilize some the database functionality of PHP. In this next section will introduce you to these concepts and build a database class that will be used for our search application.