What makes a good search form? Is it just a matter of letting a user search for a search term and use SQL LIKE to the title, tags, and post body? Or is there more I need to be aware of and take into account?

Really depends what and where you search.

A good search is a search that gives an output which is not too broad and not too limited. It's should also not be too difficult to formulate.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=366485#

This is a pretty good post about ordering results by relevance. You can assign a custom 'weight' to each field. This would probably be a more advanced feature, though.

Allow users to search across different fields, but also have the ability to select specific fields also, and narrow their searches with extra parameters. Also allowing different sort methods never hurts either

http://www.google.com

makes a good search engine. "borrow" their ideas :D

Indeed it is lol :D

http://www.google.com

makes a good search engine. "borrow" their ideas :D

Their "ideas" are a little more than I can implement at this stage in my learning career:p

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=366485#

This is a pretty good post about ordering results by relevance. You can assign a custom 'weight' to each field. This would probably be a more advanced feature, though.

How do you do something like that using variables? It's a nice example, but I really don't understand how it would work based on the fact that the user could enter in anything.

Their "ideas" are a little more than I can implement at this stage in my learning career:p



How do you do something like that using variables? It's a nice example, but I really don't understand how it would work based on the fact that the user could enter in anything.
simple text search, you can start from here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html

something more complex:

http://search.carrot2.org/stable/search
http://project.carrot2.org/download-search-plugins.html

best regards

Very interesting. You've all given me a lot of ideas to consider. Thanks:)