title: Integrating search on a website where the backend is MYSQL
body: <p>I have a location search <a href="http://www.jammulinks.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">website</a> for a city, we started out with collecting data for all possible categories in the city like Schools, Colleges, Departmental Stores etc and stored their information in a separate table, as each entry had different details apart from their name, address and phone number. </p>
  
  <p>We had to integrate search in the website to enable people to find information, so we built an index table where in we stored the categories and related keywords for the same category and the table which much be fetched if that category was searched for. Later on we added the functionality of searching on the name and address as well by adding another master table containing those fields from all the tables to one place. Now my doubt is the following</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>The application design is improper, and we have written queries like select * from master where name like "%$input%" , all over, since our database is MYSQL and PHP on serverside, is there any suggestion for me to improve on the design of the system?</li>
  <li>People want more features like splitting the keywords and ranking them according to relevance etc, is there any ready framework available which runs search on a database.</li>
  <li>I tried using Full Text Search in MYSQL and it seems effective to me, is that enough?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Correct me if i am wrong, i had a look into Lucene and Google Custom Search, don't they work on making an index by crawling existing webpages and building their own index? I have a collection of tables on a mysql database on which i have to apply searching. What options do i have?</p>