Despite being a key method of navigation on many sites, search functionality often gets the short end of the stick in development, either by handing the job over to Google or just enabling full text search on the appropriate column in the database. In this talk we will look at how full text search actually works, how to integrate local text search engines into your PHP application, and how it's possible to actually provide better and more relevant results than Google itself, at least for your own site.
Ian Barber
Ian is the development manager at Virgin Management in London, and has been working with PHP since 2002. He was formerly Delivery Manager for Ibuildings, where he worked with a variety of large enterprise clients across the UK and Europe. He is a regular conference speaker, and is interested in search, data processing, machine learning and natural language processing. Ian blogs about these topics and more on his site, PHP/ir.
