How to implement search on a webapp / website

How do you implement a s开发者_JS百科earch "engine" on your website / webapp?

Suppose that you have some products, news, events, and so on, all stored in database in different tables.

You have free text hardcoded inside website in static pages, or at least you have them as gettext files.

You want to be able to list pages that contains some of the query terms requested.

Personally, i create another table (fulltext with mysql) that contains url and contents of the page, and then i do the fulltext search on that table and report results.

This table is periodically filled by a script that reads the db and insert the data.

Are there better methods to implement a "simple" search?

Well "simple" is subjective. Your approach to search will not scale and certainly not suited to complex queries (tihnk boolean searches, or range queries etc.)

My recommendation would be to denormalize your data into a flat structure and write it to Apache Solr. It offers a RESTful interface for integrating into PHP or whatever platform you prefer. It offers faceting, caching, a sophisticated query language etc.