Creating an accurate php search engine to search database

Question

Ok, I attempted at making my own search function which doesnt work very well.

It consists of eliminating useless words such as "how" "you" "to" then using a premade Stemmer class that reduces words to their root so "Appointments" searches "appoint"

However in the end I'm really only searching keywords and the results are not very accurate.

Are there open source search engines that i can implement for free?

Answer 1

Look into using Lucene. It was originally for Java but I believe there is a PHP version in the Zend framework.

Edit: Here's the reference guide in Zend and a guide to using it.

Answer 2

I've seen implementation of the Lucene Search engine in PHP using the Zend_Search_Lucene class, which obviously uses the Zend Framework library, check out a few links.

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.search.lucene.html

http://devzone.zend.com/article/91

http://ifacethoughts.net/2008/02/07/zend-brings-lucene-to-php/