On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Ndungi Kyalo <ndungi@gmail.com> wrote:
Greetings Mr Isaak,

I do not think mysql's match() has a facility for the fuzzy searches you need. you might have to generate the permutations of the search terms youself and then pas them on to match() .. against().

Fuzzy searches are a bit of a hack, at least for me. Supposing you were searching for the phrase "Management Trainees" you would need to first search for an exact match of "Management Trainees" then probably search for the singular form "Management Trainee" {just stripping the 's' and doing the search again}, break the word into two separate terms "Management" and  "Trainee" then search for all possible combinations of the phrase.. ad infinitum.

Also known as the porter stemming algorithm, a certain skunk taught this to me way back in time :-) PHP implementations of that algorithm can be found here:
http://www.phpguru.org/static/PorterStemmer.html
http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/php.txt