How to make a PHP search engine

Learn how to create a php search engine with a step-by-step example. Get ready to power up your website's search capabilities!

Creating a PHP Search Engine

Creating a PHP search engine is a simple process. To get started, you will need to create a form to accept user input. The form should include a text box, a submit button, and a hidden field that will tell the script which type of search to perform.

<form action="search.php" method="post">
    <input type="text" name="keyword">
    <input type="hidden" name="searchtype" value="simple">
    <input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>

The form will submit the user's input to a PHP script. The script will then use the keyword entered by the user and search for results in a MySQL database. You can create the database in phpMyAdmin or use an existing one.

Once the database is setup, you will need to create a PHP script to handle the search. The script will first create a SQL query using the keyword entered by the user. The query should search the database for any records that contain the keyword.

$query = "SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE column_name LIKE '%$keyword%'";
$result = mysqli_query($query);

Once the query is executed, the script will loop through the results and display them on the page. You can use a while loop to loop through the results and print them out on the page.

while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
     echo $row['column_name'];
}

That's all there is to creating a PHP search engine. With just a few lines of code, you can create a powerful search engine that can search a database for any keyword.