Re: Keyword Indexing Like Google, Ebay etc.

[Margaret MacDonald]

I can't offer much specific help, but from your description of the problem it sounds as though you want to do more than simple string-matching. If that is so, then 95% of your time will be spent pre-processing the user's input to extract meaning from it. I definitely would not try to do that using sql. Pre-processing is a job for a general-purpose language, not a database-lookup one.

If you're going to have to process English-language input, there are various places that you can find pseudo-code for the syntax decision tree. One of them is Terry Winograd's description of his 1971 virtual-robot program 'Shrdlu', but there are probably more recent ones that might actually be better.