Mysql – How to rank the product higher and the accessories lower? (MySql fulltext search)

full-text-searchMySQL

I hope this is not a silly question.

I have a table containg the products of an online store. I am using fulltext search in boolean mode.

People search for, let us say, Apple iPhone 11.

I don't want "Cleaning kit for Apple iPhone 11" to come first and the product itself "Apple iPhone 11" to come second.

Best Answer

You just need to link back to the Product table and sort by some other criteria on there. You can ask the Full Text engine to rank the results, but that really just ranks how closely the result matches their search, which is not what you are looking for. I have a sample here using MS SQL Server.

Since you didn't provide a schema, I put together something that would show what I mean.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Product

CREATE TABLE dbo.Product
    (
    ProductID INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1)
    , ProductName NVARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
    , SearchPrecedence INT NULL
    , CONSTRAINT PK_Product PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (ProductID)
    )

GO

BEGIN TRY
    CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG FTC_FullText AS DEFAULT
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
    PRINT 'Full Text Catalog already exists.'
END CATCH

CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON dbo.Product(ProductName) KEY INDEX PK_Product;

GO

INSERT INTO dbo.Product 
(ProductName, SearchPrecedence)
VALUES ('Iphone', 1)
    , ('Iphone Clean', 100)

GO

/** NOTE: need to wait a bit here so that we give the engine time to build the full text results.  
    This code works, but Full Text is not synchronous with writes
    **/

WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:30.000'

DECLARE @Search NVARCHAR(100) = '"*Iphone*"'

SELECT P.ProductID
    , P.ProductName
    , P.SearchPrecedence
FROM dbo.Product AS P
WHERE P.ProductID IN (SELECT PFT.[Key] FROM CONTAINSTABLE(dbo.Product, *, @Search) AS PFT)
ORDER BY P.SearchPrecedence

Related Solutions

MySQL – Why Full-Text Search Returns Fewer Rows Than LIKE

I took the three strings in your question and added it to a table plus three more string with pankt instead of punkt.

The following was executed using MySQL 5.5.12 for Windows

mysql> CREATE TABLE artikel
    -> (
    ->     id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    ->     meldungstext MEDIUMTEXT,
    ->     PRIMARY KEY (id),
    ->     FULLTEXT (meldungstext)
    -> ) ENGINE=MyISAM;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO artikel (meldungstext) VALUES
    -> ('Punkten'),('Zwei-Punkte-Vorsprung'),('Treffpunkt'),
    -> ('Pankten'),('Zwei-Pankte-Vorsprung'),('Treffpankt');
Query OK, 6 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 6  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql>

I ran these queries against the table using 3 different approaches

MATCH ... AGAINST
LOCATE as in the LOCATE function
LIKE

Please note the differences

mysql> SELECT id,meldungstext,
    -> COUNT(IF(MATCH (`meldungstext`) AGAINST ('*punkt*' IN BOOLEAN MODE),1,0)) PunktMatch,
    -> IF(LOCATE('punkt',meldungstext)>0,1,0) PunktLocate,
    -> meldungstext  LIKE '%punkt%' PunktLike
    -> FROM `artikel` GROUP BY id,meldungstext;
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
| id | meldungstext          | PunktMatch | PunktLocate | PunktLike |
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
|  1 | Punkten               |          1 |           1 |         1 |
|  2 | Zwei-Punkte-Vorsprung |          1 |           1 |         1 |
|  3 | Treffpunkt            |          1 |           1 |         1 |
|  4 | Pankten               |          1 |           0 |         0 |
|  5 | Zwei-Pankte-Vorsprung |          1 |           0 |         0 |
|  6 | Treffpankt            |          1 |           0 |         0 |
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
6 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql>

All the PunktMatch values should bee 3 1's and 3 0's.

Now watch me query them as normal

mysql> SELECT `meldungstext` FROM `artikel`
    -> WHERE MATCH (`meldungstext`) AGAINST ('*punkt*' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
+-----------------------+
| meldungstext          |
+-----------------------+
| Zwei-Punkte-Vorsprung |
| Punkten               |
+-----------------------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> SELECT `meldungstext` FROM `artikel`
    -> WHERE LOCATE('punkt',meldungstext)>0;
+-----------------------+
| meldungstext          |
+-----------------------+
| Punkten               |
| Zwei-Punkte-Vorsprung |
| Treffpunkt            |
+-----------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT `meldungstext` FROM `artikel`
    -> WHERE `meldungstext` LIKE '%punk%';
+-----------------------+
| meldungstext          |
+-----------------------+
| Punkten               |
| Zwei-Punkte-Vorsprung |
| Treffpunkt            |
+-----------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

OK using MATCH .. AGAINST with punkt does not work. What about pankt ???

mysql> SELECT `meldungstext` FROM `artikel` WHERE `meldungstext` LIKE '%pankt%';
+-----------------------+
| meldungstext          |
+-----------------------+
| Pankten               |
| Zwei-Pankte-Vorsprung |
| Treffpankt            |
+-----------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

Let's run my big GROUP BY query against pankt

mysql> SELECT id,meldungstext,
    -> COUNT(IF(MATCH (`meldungstext`) AGAINST ('*pankt*' IN BOOLEAN MODE),1,0)) PanktMatch,
    -> IF(LOCATE('pankt',meldungstext)>0,1,0) PanktLocate,
    -> meldungstext  LIKE '%pankt%' PanktLike
    -> FROM `artikel` GROUP BY id,meldungstext;
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
| id | meldungstext          | PanktMatch | PanktLocate | PanktLike |
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
|  1 | Punkten               |          1 |           0 |         0 |
|  2 | Zwei-Punkte-Vorsprung |          1 |           0 |         0 |
|  3 | Treffpunkt            |          1 |           0 |         0 |
|  4 | Pankten               |          1 |           1 |         1 |
|  5 | Zwei-Pankte-Vorsprung |          1 |           1 |         1 |
|  6 | Treffpankt            |          1 |           1 |         1 |
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
6 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql>

This is wrong also because I should see 3 0's and 3 1's for PanktMatch.

I tried something else

mysql> SELECT id,meldungstext, MATCH (`meldungstext`) AGAINST ('+*pankt*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) PanktMatch, IF(LOCATE('pankt',meldungstext)>0,1,0) PanktLocate, meldungstext  LIKE '%pankt%' PanktLike FROM `artikel` GROUP BY id,meldungstext;
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
| id | meldungstext          | PanktMatch | PanktLocate | PanktLike |
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
|  1 | Punkten               |          0 |           0 |         0 |
|  2 | Zwei-Punkte-Vorsprung |          0 |           0 |         0 |
|  3 | Treffpunkt            |          0 |           0 |         0 |
|  4 | Pankten               |          1 |           1 |         1 |
|  5 | Zwei-Pankte-Vorsprung |          1 |           1 |         1 |
|  6 | Treffpankt            |          0 |           1 |         1 |
+----+-----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

I added a plus sign to pankt and I got different results. What 2 and not 3 ???

According to the MySQL Documentation, notice what it says about the wildcard character:

*

The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.

If a word is specified with the truncation operator, it is not stripped from a boolean query, even if it is too short (as determined from the ft_min_word_len setting) or a stopword. This occurs because the word is not seen as too short or a stopword, but as a prefix that must be present in the document in the form of a word that begins with the prefix. Suppose that ft_min_word_len=4. Then a search for '+word +the*' will likely return fewer rows than a search for '+word +the':

The former query remains as is and requires both word and the* (a word starting with the) to be present in the document.

The latter query is transformed to +word (requiring only word to be present). the is both too short and a stopword, and either condition is enough to cause it to be ignored.

Based on this, the wildcard character is applicable for the back of tokens and not for the front. In light of this, the output must be correct because 2 of the 3 punkt's start tokens. Same story with pankt. This at least explains why 2 out of 3 and why less rows.

Mysql – why/how does the number of matched columns influences the way of excecuting a query

I can provide with a general explanation, but it may not apply specifically to your particular case:

The way decision making works is by evaluation cost of execution plan, then picking up what is hopefully the cheapest plan. This you already know.

When it comes to indexing, though, stuff are getting interesting. The way to evaluate the usefulness or viability of an index is to estimate the selectivity given some value.

For the moment, forget about your FULLTEXT index, and let's assume a simple index on some column col1, and another index on some column col2. Given the following two queries:

SELECT * FROM t WHERE col1 < 10 and col2 = 4;
SELECT * FROM t WHERE col1 BETWEEN 100 AND 110 and col2 = 4;

It may happen that the query is evaluated differently in these two cases. Why? Because it may happen that col2 = 4 returns more rows than col1 < 10, in which case we prefer to use index on col1. But then, it may return less rows than col1 BETWEEN 100 AND 110, in which case we prefer the index on col2.

Your case is not very much different. MySQL estimates the number of rows returned by some index query. When you use more columns, MySQL gets the impression your index is likely to result with few rows. So it chooses to start with TableA, then joins what should be very few rows with TableB.

But if MySQL believes the index to return many rows, it may prefer starting with TableB. Why is that? Because you are sorting on indexed columns of TableB. Sorting is a lot of work, too. So MySQL may choose to first sort the rows, then join to TableA and filter by fulltext index. It may not be a bad idea if the fulltext search yields with many rows anyhow.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MySQL – Why Full-Text Search Returns Fewer Rows Than LIKE

Mysql – why/how does the number of matched columns influences the way of excecuting a query

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