[thelist] Search engine

[Joshua Olson]

Does anybody know off the top of there head what percentage of users
actually understand "wildcards"?  Most understand keywords, but not
wildcards and conditionals such as "AND" "OR" "NOT" etc.  Also, what
percentage of users know that if you quote a couple of words in the keyword
list that some engines will look for that exact string in the data--no
matter how many words it is.

I reckon what you'll find (cross my fingers) is that simply looking up the
keywords with the build in LIKE '%[keyword]%' will produce adequate results.
Just remember to include each keyword in the list they type in a separate
AND clause for each field you want to search.

For example, say I enter the keywords: joshua dog house

Then the query would look like this

SELECT id, title
FROM pubs
WHERE title + ' ' + author + ' ' + body LIKE '%joshua%'
AND title + ' ' + author + ' ' + body LIKE '%dog%'
AND title + ' ' + author + ' ' + body LIKE '%house%'

This will return only the records where those all three words appear in at
least once within the title, authors name, or body.  There is another more
complex way to do this with a whole lot of AND's and OR's, but OR's tend to
be *really* slow, so the concatenation seems to be bigger.

If this does not work for you, I can discuss creation of a lexicon and
searching within that for the keywords.  The lexicon method is *really*
*really* fast, but requires a complex combining of result sets and can be
time consuming to create.  Just say the word and I'll outline the technique.

-joshua

----- Original Message -----
From: "Faye Tarzwell(FayeC)" <fayec at canada.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 4:19 PM
Subject: Re: [thelist] Search engine


: Hi Joshua,
:
: This is what I would like to know myself.
: They have given me very little information on the job on their first
: contact with me.
: The only thing I know for sure is that they have an Access database and
: all the other info about the search (by title, author, etc.) I got by
: taking a look at their site.
: It seems to me like a pretty decent search but lacking the wildcard
: (don't really know if this is good or bad).
: They want to improve customer satisfaction with the search results...
: I don't have much info than that.
: Any ideas of what to add to it so it become a more robust search engine?
:
: FayeC