How to order mysql results by column priority?

Question

How to order mysql results by column priority?

Example. I have a table of products, the table contains two columns, product name (p.name) and product description (p.desc).

Users should be able to enter keywords to find products in the database.

"p.name LIKE '%keyword%' OR p.desc LIKE '%keyword%'

I want the results that match p.name returned first and the p.desc second.

How would I go about achieving this?

Answer 1

I would try something like

ORDER BY (NOT (p.name LIKE '%keyword%'))

If your first condition is satisfied, order by clause will evaluate to false. Thus, such records will be pushed ahead.

edit
Equals sign (=) has probably got into the question by mistake.

Answer 2

You should try MySQL Full Text Search as in MATCH() ... AGAINST and more here. Then order by the search rank with the columns.