Computer Science Canada

Searching by category

Author:  QuantumPhysics [ Wed Jan 30, 2013 10:32 am ]
Post subject:  Searching by category

I am making a listings website for a group of people. I have everything finished except one thing. I don't know how to make a search bar that searches by keywords discretely for listings on the site. Could someone point me in the right direction? I know how to make a search bar but I don't know how to make it search for keywords from listings people make on the site.

Author:  DemonWasp [ Wed Jan 30, 2013 1:16 pm ]
Post subject:  RE:Searching by category

While you could implement a search yourself, it's not trivial to do a good job of it. Even accounting for spelling errors isn't particularly easy. Most sites just farm the work out to Google: http://www.google.com/cse/

Author:  Sur_real [ Sat Feb 02, 2013 8:37 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Searching by category

Other than using google (which is probably the easier/best way to do it like DemonWasp pointed out) but another option (if you wanna not be lazy Very Happy) is if you have the data in a db, you can try searching by stemming the words.
See this wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming

Like you take the input, split it by spaces into words then run it through a stemmer. Then take all of those words (stemmed and unstemmed) and search them in your db.
However, stemming has its limitation though. See this SO post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/190775/stemming-algorithm-that-produces-real-words/


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