Search string by exact word in Mysql

Question

I have a system that searches for company. I want that when a user searches for \"Demo\", all records that have \"Demo\" will be returned, like \"The Demo\", \"Demo Inc.\",

Answer 1

Try testing for a space at both sides:

select * from table where company LIKE "Demo %" OR company LIKE "% Demo"

However, as you have stated you need to make use of your indexes and anything with a leading wildcard % won't use the indexes.

So, I think that you need to implement some kind of pre-processing on your search columns, something along the lines of:

Pre-process your record names:

• Use a stemming algorithm on all the record names in your database
• Store the stemmed words in one table (stemmed_words)
• Record the number of occurrences of the stemmed word against the record id (record_index)

Then when the user searches:

• Use a stemming algorithm on the search term words
• Query your tables to find the result with the most frequently used stemmed word

Example stemmed_words Table columns:

id, stemmed_word  // Eg. 1 (auto generated), "Demo"

Example record_index Table columns:

record_id, stemmed_word_id, occurrence_count // Eg. 1 (auto generated), 1 (ID of "Demo" in stemmed_words table), 2 (2 occurrences)

Here's a basic tutorial to get you started with stemming and word counts