There are a number of approaches that can be used to add search functionality to a website. For a while, Sphider, a PHPServer-side scripting language for web development. based search tool was my preferred approach, and later using Google was briefly considered. However, since all of the website content is housed in the database in the Content table it seemed relatively simple exercise to develop a basic search tool.

Also since the decision to place the content in the database was motivated by goals of an upcoming project to automatically add links to keywords, this project seemed like an opportunity to get comfortable with text parsing. The goals for the search functionality are modest; find documents that contain the words given by the user and rank the results based on the prevalence of the words.

There may be future work to add more bells and whistles but for now, this is sufficient.