Website search engine

[jamesgould]

Okay, what I want to do with my site is enable users to search all the alt descriptions of the many photos on my site. (Here is an example of a page: http://www.marathonstadium.com/2007-25p.php)

Now I don't mind taking all those links and putting them in seperate files to make the process easier, say one big file of links for each years matches, that would reduce the search to 20 files rather than 1000 (and also remove the other html that would get in the way of the search). But if that is not an issue then that's good too!

Anyway, basically I want the result to be a page pretty much as the one above, but with only the images showing with the players name or whatever that people have searched for.

I'm not even sure where to start looking for any ideas on this, have tried google but found nothing. Can anyone help? Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, btw. :)

[Neat Pete]

Firstly, dont be afraid of the size of it, it's 2007 not 1987 with a 286 running at 12 MHz.

This same problem is everywhere. A friend has 90,000 quotes by 30,000 authors on his PC. When we looked at the words used, it was something like 20,00 words, but with one million usages of these words in the 90,000 quotes. Access 97, 10 years old, can handle this quite easily on a home PC.

The point is that it's a many-to-many relationship. In your case, you have several words in each alt tag. The many-to-many means, in your case, each word will be used in many alt tags, and each alt tag can contain several words.

Furthermore, the many-to-many means you need a relational database. This means you need a host other than PowWeb.

Design first, implement second. Otherwise it's Alice in Wonderland's "sentence first, trial afterwards".