Hi all,

Before I embark on a quest to improve our site search I was wondering if 
anyone knew of any good articles or has any advice on how to achieve what I 
want.

I want to be able to allow the user to add a + or - before the words in the 
search criteria (like Google) to specify words that must or must not be in 
the results.

The way I am contemplating doing this at the moment would be it take the 
search criteria and split it into an array by the space character, then 
iterate through that and create two separate arrays, one containing all of 
the words that have a + and one that contains all the words that contain 
a -.

I would then construct a sql query using the first array and then at the end 
a criteria using NOT = and then the words in the second array.

Does this sound like a plan?

If so, how would I get around an exact phrase search, whereby the user may 
enter ".net for dummies" -2.0

If I used the above approach I would have now split the criteria by the 
space character and lost the ability to use the "'s....

That would suggest that I would need to split the search criteria by the 
quotes in the first place, but if I do that I'd end up with 2 strings, one 
would equal .net for dummies and the other would equal -2.0 , and I'd have 
no idea which contained the exact phrase...especially when a user might do 
something like this:

+piggy "charlottes web" -farm

Can anyone help me out with this?

My project is seaching index server, so far its working well and has a very 
pleasing output, I now want to add additional functionality/support to it.

Thanks in advance,

Regards

Rob