How to sort MYSQL fulltext search results by relevancy

Question

I am relatively new to MYSQL and have had an issue that has been bugging me for a while. I've tried googling all over the place for the answer, but have unable to find an acceptable solution as of yet.

Here is the query I am running currently to find the best possible match for a given search term:

$query="SELECT * from `vocabulary` WHERE translation = 'word' OR translation LIKE '%word%'"; 

The results it returns are comprehensive in that they include all relevant rows. However, they are not sorted in any particular order, and I would like to have the ones with an exact match displayed first when I print results in PHP. Like this:

---

1 | word <-exact match
2 | crossword <- partial matches sorted alphabetically /
3 | words
4 | wordsmith

---

Thank you very much in advance for your assistance.

-macspacejunkie

Answer 1

LIKE is not fulltext search. In Fulltext search, MATCH(...) AGAINST(...) returns a matching score that can be roughly approximated as relevancy.

Answer 2

You can get a good relevance search by creating a fulltext index and then matching against your search term.

So something like this should work.

ALTER TABLE `vocabulary` ADD FULLTEXT INDEX `SEARCH`(`translation`);  SELECT *, MATCH(translation) AGAINST ('+word' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS relevance  FROM `vocabulary` WHERE MATCH(translation) AGAINST ('+word' IN BOOLEAN MODE) ORDER BY relevance DESC 

More information this can be found in the MySQL Reference Manual.