PHP, FullText Seaches, and MySQL

[clamum]

I need to make a search better using PHP and MySQL. I did a bit of reading and saw the FullText feature of MySQL which would work great for me. Unfortunately, it only works for MyISAM tables. The tables that contain my data are InnoDB due to the use of foreign keys. So, I guess using the FullText feature is out of the question.

Is there any way to provide a more powerful search using PHP and MySQL? Right now the search is a search on some varchar fields using the LIKE operator, which works fairly well. However, while a search of "gift" will hit on a text of "gifts", a search of "gifts" will not hit "gift". That's sort of the problem I'm having, I need to make it a bit less sensitive. Aside from explicitly telling the user to use simple search terms, can I improve this?

 

[jjones]

This might be of some help: http://www.dataparksearch.org/

It's an open source search engine that if you don't want to use it as is, you might try and extract the words forms component for your use.