Is it possible to 'store search criteria' and the reuse it at some other time?

I have a classifieds website where users may search ads.

I wonder if I can somehow store search criteria and whenever the users wishes, reuse that search criteria to make another search again, exactly the same... ?

This would make it easier for users to search for a specific car for instance, and not have to fill in all the details such as year, make, mileage, fuel etc...

BTW, I am planning on using either Sphinx or SOLR as a "search engine"... Currently it is MYSQL but I have to change that...

And the website is mostly PHP based.

Thanks

Sure, it's possible. Those search criteria are data, just likely everything else. You can store them in the DB, in a file, in the user session, in a cookie, whatever.

You could have a table that logs user ID, query ID, time, the search term and the search value, and then log search criteria in the table.

So for example, if a user searches for a blue car built in 1998, you could add two records like the following:

user_id | query_id | timestamp           | term  | value
=======   ========   ===================   =====   =====
1001      326        2010-01-07 11:01:30   color   blue
1001      326        2010-01-07 11:01:30   year    1998

This makes your database table scalable, but you can then also pull out individual results for all searches made for say, a particular color, or model, or year etc. You can also refine these results by time period as the time-stamp of each search is recorded, or even pull out a particular user's preferences and send them targeted listings. The possibilities are endless.