A Proposal for Site Search

The subject of a search function for this website has been on the back-burner for a while.

Having had some success with getting pages to appear in the Google and other search engine indices the main method of finding information on this website will remain to be an Internet search. The theory here is that there is little point in spending too much time in allowing a visitor to find things on a website if they don't find it in the first place.

When your website has been found and becomes popular it is then that a site search is something that it is worth spending time on. The irony here is that platforms such as Wordpress and other CMS offer a search function as a standard feature. The reason for this is that these CMS are database based. This meaning the content is stored in a relational database and can be queried using SQL.

The design

This is probably that I will have to have a few attempts at.

I will start with a couple of tables:

• Pages - Title, file_name. key_word
• Keywords - key_word. file_name

I need to think of what I want as columns, a first stab is above.

The SQL for retrieval on the submission of a search needs to be worked out.

Tables can be created using PHPmyAdmin or I could develop my own scripts and run them on queries based from earlier pages.

Table Joins and Queries

This is an opportunity to actually learn something!

The Plan

When a new page is authored or updated a "service" page will be used to place an entry in the "search" tables.