Appropriate Search Algorithm for my Web site

Question

Dear All I am creating a website like community helplike question and answering. There have a search option.What will be the best search algorithm or procedure for searching question and answer?

Ali Ahmed · Answer

Data will be stored in SQL server databasehuge amount of data will be thereso that when a user search any term this will be time consumed. Thats why I can't search using simple query like Select * from Table where tablerow=%like%. Please help me giving simple solution. Thank you

Amit Choudhary · Answer

Search algorithms are programs but what you're looking for is Search Techniques. Searching works on data which can be on any form. 1. Do you want to search static content of Website? (Simply Google search plugin would help you.) 2. Do you want to search for the data that is generated by Dynamic pages(forms)? which is the case that I think fits your requirements. I'm not sure what type of storage you have for your data but lets assume you have RDBMS as storage unit. Now the search techniques are provided by the Relations database providers e.g. Sql Server Oracle etc. They have out of box feature that provided searching mechanis. In Sql server we have FullTextSearch feature that allows you to define a Catalog for search and define Table/Column where the search has to be perform. But his is handful if you have a huge database and large number of tables. On the other hand you can also implement a custom search. Which can simply be achieved by create a custom Store procedure. There you would need a search algorithm. A combination of Joins/Where clauses would simply do it but you need draw a big picture first. E.g. If user searched for Water logging problem then think of a search technique with following things in mind: What table(s) you want to search for data matching the search? Define column to be searched in tables? Define search patterns. E.g. Contains Starts with etc. Also you may want to break the sentence to words if whole sentence returns no results. Then search with each word composite the results. Then Rank it based on matching percentage.(you would need a algorithm for this you can get it searching around on internet).