I've been loking into Mysql's Match Against search. The results are strange. For example, if I have a table attribute with an entry "education" and do a search (using match against) for "edu" then it finds it. But if i search for "educ" no results are returned. All the way up to "educatio" does not return results. So it only matches whole words, or if 3 letters or less match in a word.
Is there a way to improve it so that results are returned when a search term is a subset of a word in the attribute? E.g. using the example above, searching "educat" would return rows containing "Education"
You can do exactly what you want by matching IN BOOLEAN MODE and using the * operator.
For example:
... MATCH(thing) AGAINST ('+educat*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)...
The + tells the match to include only the values of thing that contain the match term, which in this case is all indexed values beginning with "educat" (see here for how Boolean mode works in detail).
As an aside, Fulltext search in MySQL does not index words of 3 or fewer characters by default, so I suspect your match with "edu" is not working the way you think. Look at the value of your ft_min_word_len variable to see if that's the case.
you can use the mark %a (a=your word or letter)that search any word that start with the same word or letter
you can use %a% that search part of the word that the start and/or in the middle of the word
and the last one you can use a% that ends with the word or letter
Related
I am making a library management system.
I have a problem in the search for a book from mysql database.
For searching data in mysql we use full text search .
But it only works if a full word is given. If user enters an incomplete word instead of the actual word , is there any function to search.
ex : if book name is calculus,
if user types calc , then also the books should come
You can try using fulltext search with boolean mode, which allows a few extra operators. You will be interested in the truncation operator (*):
The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike
the other operators, it is appended to the word to be affected. Words
match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.
If a word is specified with the truncation operator, it is not
stripped from a boolean query, even if it is too short or a stopword.
Whether a word is too short is determined from the
innodb_ft_min_token_size setting for InnoDB tables, or ft_min_word_len
for MyISAM tables. These options are not applicable to FULLTEXT
indexes that use the ngram parser.
The wildcarded word is considered as a prefix that must be present at
the start of one or more words. If the minimum word length is 4, a
search for '+word +the*' could return fewer rows than a search for
'+word +the', because the second query ignores the too-short search
term the.
Pls note, that you cannot start an expression with the * operator, so the results cannot include a book, which title contains 'calc', only which title starts with 'calc'.
You can use the LIKE operator with the "%" wildcard
With LIKE you can use the following two wildcard characters in the pattern:
% matches any number of characters, even zero characters.
for example
SELECT * FROM <Table> where book like "%calc%";
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/string-comparison-functions.html
I dont want rows to be returned where the LIKE is matching a partial word. I am splitting strings on whitespace and then generating a query that will find a match, but its returning matches for partial words. Here is an example
SELECT ID from VideoGames WHERE Title Like "%GI%" AND Title Like "%JOE%"
Returns a match where title = "Yu-Gi-Oh! Power of Chaos: Joey the Passion".
I know only matching full words wont completely resolve the issue, but it will hugely increase accuracy. What can i do to return what i want rather than this.
You can use RLIKE, the regular expression version of LIKE to get more flexibility with your matching.
SELECT ID from VideoGames
WHERE Title RLIKE "[[:<:]]GI[[:>:]]" AND Title RLIKE "[[:<:]]JOE[[:>:]]"
The [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] markers are word boundaries marking the start and and of a word respectively. You could build a single regex rather than the AND but I have made this match your original question.
I'm pretty new to MySQL full-text searches and I ran into this problem today:
My company table has a record with "e-magazine AG" in the name column. I have a full-text index on the name column.
When I execute this query the record is not found:
SELECT id, name FROM company WHERE MATCH(name) AGAINST('+"e-magazi"*' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
I need to work with quotes because of the dash and to use the wildcard because I implement a "search as you type" functionality.
When I search for the whole term "e-magazine AG", the record is found.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong here? I read about adding the dash to the list of word characters (config update needed) but I'm searching for a way to do this programmatically.
This clause
MATCH(name) AGAINST('+"e-magazi"*' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
Will search for a AND "e" AND NOT "magazi"; i.e. the - inside "e-magazi" will be interpreted as a not even though it is inside quotation marks.
For this reason it will not work as expected.
A solution is to apply an extra having clause with a LIKE.
I know this having is slow, but it will only be applied to the results of the match, so not too many rows should be involved.
I suggest something like:
SELECT id, name
FROM company
WHERE MATCH(name) AGAINST('magazine' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
HAVING name LIKE '%e-magazi%';
MySQL fulltext treats the word e-magazine in a text as a phrase and not as a word. Because of that it results the two words e and magazine. And while it builds the search index it does not add the e to the index because of the ft_min_word_len (default is 4 chars).
The same length limitation is used for the search query. That is the reason why a search for e-magazine returns exactly the same results as a-magazine because a and - is fully ignored.
But now you want to find the exact phrase e-magazine. By that you use the quotes and that is the complete correct way to find phrases, but MySQL does not support operators for phrases, only for words:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/fulltext-boolean.html
With this modifier, certain characters have special meaning at the beginning or end of words in the search string
Some people would suggest to use the following query:
SELECT id, name
FROM company
WHERE MATCH(name) AGAINST('e-magazi*' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
HAVING name LIKE 'e-magazi%';
As I said MySQL ignores the e- and searches for the wildcard word magazi*. After those results are optained it uses HAVING to aditionally filter the results for e-magazi* including the e-. By that you will find the phrase e-magazine AG. Of course HAVING is only needed if the search phrase contains the wildcard operator and you should never use quotes. This operator is used by your user and not you!
Note: As long you do not surround the search phrase with % it will find only fields that start with that word. And you do not want to surround it, because it would find bee-magazine as well. So maybe you need an additional OR HAVING name LIKE ' %e-magazi%' OR HAVING NAME LIKE '\\n%e-magazi%' to make it usable inside of texts.
Trick
But finally I prefer a trick so HAVING isn't needed at all:
If you add texts to your database table, add them additionally to a separate fulltext indexed column and replace words like up-to-date with up-to-date uptodate.
If a user searches for up-to-date replace it in the query with uptodate.
By that you can still find specific in user-specific but up-to-date as well (and not only date).
Bonus
If a user searches for -well-known huge ports MySQL treats that as not include *well*, could include *known* and *huge*. Of course you could solve that with an other extra query variant as well, but with the trick above you remove the hyphen so the search query looks simply like that:
SELECT id
FROM texts
WHERE MATCH(text) AGAINST('-wellknown huge ports' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
Having problems getting the following query to work. I want to match the actual string " to control word relevance.
SELECT * FROM (table)
WHERE MATCH (field) AGAINST ("+<foo><![CDATA[1850]" IN BOOLEAN MODE)
When I run this it returns almost all records in the database, not just those which match the exact string.
AFAIK you can not use special characters in full text search indexes. It is limited to TEXT. (Words to be exact. For example you can have a list of most common words to be excepted form this index). You have to use LIKE if you are searching for pieces of code with special characters.
I am trying to follow: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-natural-language.html
in an attempt to improve search queries, both in speed and the ability to order by score.
However when using this SQL ("skitt" is used as a search term just so I can try match Skittles).
SELECT
id,name,description,price,image,
MATCH (name,description)
AGAINST ('skitt')
AS score
FROM
products
WHERE
MATCH (name,description)
AGAINST ('skitt')
it returns 0 results. I am trying to find out why, I think I might have set my index's up wrong I'm not sure, this is the first time I've strayed away from LIKE!
Here is my table structure and data:
Thank you!
By default certain words are excluded from the search. These are called stopwords. "a" is an example of a stopword. You could test your query by using a word that is not a stopword, or you can disable stopwords:
How can I write full search index query which will not consider any stopwords?
If you want to also match prefixes use the truncation operator in boolean mode:
*
The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.