understanding the best design method for links table

[Jason Bronson]

I've got a table which has items in it for an autocomplete list when users type in a name it populates a list.

CREATE TABLE `items` (
`id` double NOT NULL auto_increment,
`name` varchar(2000) NOT NULL,
`description` text NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY USING BTREE (`illness_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=7 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1


I'm trying to create another table which will have links to combine the items so when a user search's with text, they get a list of items related but not always exactly what they type....

Example

User types in "ap"
SQL grabs the item from the items table using a
"select id from items where name like 'ap%'"

Returns let's say
apple, apricot, artichokes

I would then need to pull from my new table not created yet the links which apple has to other items in the table, because I might want to offer to the user oranges if they are using apples and apricot might link to apples and artichokes etc...

In theory there could be many relationships between the items...
Obviously I could easily just have a simple link table like this but I wondered what other options there are?

CREATE TABLE `links` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`item_id` double NOT NULL,
`item_link` double NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)