I just got the regular monthly email from php|architect Magazine informing me that this month's issue is ready to download, and listing all the wonderful things inside. Turns out they went ahead and published the article I wrote for them a couple of months ago.
The article was titled "How To Write Your Own Search Engine", although they've retitled it and updated it a bit. It covers the use of the inverted index technique to write a search tool using MySQL. I've been doing this kind of technique for a few years now, and I've had to explain it to colleagues so many times, it's nice to finally have an article I can give them instead.
I think it came out well, although I may have spotted a small bug introduced when they tweaked the code I wrote... I'm not sure, as I'm pretty tired and hopped up on morphine, amitriptyline and codeine (all prescribed!) to try to loosen me up after a fairly painful ten-hour trip to London and back for my six-month post-operative appointment with my orthopaedic surgeon.
Anyway, I *think* they've missed out a strtolower() call in Listing 3 around line 17 or 18, thus making searches case-sensitive, even though the indexer downcases everything. As a result, I'm not sure the search will actually work unless you always type in lowercase.
Well, not to worry... whoever did the code clearup must've had a fairly tedious job of getting rid of some of my code style idiosyncracies in an effort to make it more "standard", so I don't begrudge them the odd bug or two.
It was a bit of a surprise seeing the article, as I hadn't heard back from them since I'd submitted the original draft a while ago. Other than a few updates to PDO rather than the mysqli based code I submitted, they haven't made many changes, so I guess my draft was okay as it was.
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