A couple of months ago, on our Premium site, I wrote a tutorial focused on creating a static search engine that spidered down through a site hierarchy and searched each web page that it found for a given text string. This type of search was aimed at owners of web sites consisting of static HTML pages. In this tutorial + screencast we’re going to do the same thing, but this time instead of navigating folders and subfolders looking for pages, we’re going to search a database instead. Join today!
Join Tuts Premium

For those unfamiliar, the family of TUTS sites runs a premium membership service called “Premium”. For $19 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies at nettuts+, psdtuts+, and vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Join today!
- Subscribe to the NETTUTS RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.


RoyalSlider – Touch-Enable ... only $12.00 
First and another bait and switch
And how is this a bait and switch?
Neil – I think you’re confused. Both of these tutorials were PLUS tuts.
So what, it’s not like Nettuts are charging $50 per view.
Your $9 dollars here is really small for this tutorial.
yes $9 dollars are small but i still can’t access this service ’cause i do not have a credit card.
YOU SHOULD CHANGE THE PAYMENT OPTIONS! I THINK THAT THE “TUTS STAFF” DO NOT REALIZE THAT OR DON’T CARE ABOUT THAT.
I have PayPal and can send money but at the moment the system that the “TUTS STAFF” uses can’t handle payments without credit card.
Is it to difficult for you or are you just to lazy to implement a system for *everyone* ?
Neil – You my friend are a bait and switch for stupidity.. Excuse my english it might offend!
Great idea. I ran into a problem when searching my site where the search only tackles static html, my dynamic DB driven info is not searched. This may be my solution!
this is nice tuts!
Aw nuts, I’ll have to get that Plus thing.
Guys, come on. Pony up the dough for some quality learning material. At $9 a month these Tuts are freaking steal.
@jeff (re: neil’s post) … I agree with you that this technically doesn’t meet the criterion of “bait and switch”.
My guess is, and you may have already figured it out, that because the format you used for the post is identical to that which you have conditioned us pavlovian cannines to begin salivating for a new piece of PHP to learn, when he saw that it was basically an advertisement he was disappointed. He felt he had been “lured” into clicking “read more” for just an add.
Easily solved with just a bit of CSS don’t you think – perhaps an idea for another tut! (Or simple title change – “Available on xxx: Title”)
Did the ‘New PLUS Tutorial’ that’s in the title not give it away? Nettuts, you sneaky bastards.
In my opinion, if you’re not willing to invest $9/month in developing your trade to offer bleeding edge methods and technologies to your customers then you have no business doing business in the first place.
It still baffles me how people can take themselves seriously while sitting behind their design machine or their Macbook and complain about a website that offers a plethora of dynamic content for free.
Already learned this from the book Learning jQuery 1.3. One of the best jQuery books.
The title does say “New PLUS tutorial” – same as it always does when other PLUS tutorials show up in my RSS feed.
I don’t know how much clearer it has to get. Are you guys in kindergarten or are you really morons?
Frankly it is getting annoying to read these complaints every time a PLUS tutorial is published. Please take your sorry freeloading asses somewhere else.
I’m bored of these “I’m too tight to pay $9 comments” every single time. If you like this site and you don’t want to sign up to plus then don’t and be happy with whatever content you get for free.
If you want the plus content, pay the token gesture amount it costs and get the benefits. Very simple, no need for discussion, no one makes you read and participate on this site.
“First and another bait and switch” = I’m one of the annoying people thats proud of posting the first comment. I never have anything relevant to say or offer a link to a related topic, I just consume whatever I can for free without any contribution and then expect people to listen to my worthless opinions.
WOW! This post is very informative – I am definitely adding you to my digg / reader. :)
$9 is about £4.50 here so thats less than a linux mag issue which is about £6.99 = $11
or .net which is about £7.50 about $13
also no adds and a full articule.
Im joining up this weekend.
Also its better than lynda.com whichi i joined thats about $250 for a year!
also better than a slap in the face……well thats what my dad says :)
Depends what kind of things you’re into. :)
Great Search System using a Modal Overlay, nice technique but it would be better if it was given for free!
Hey another nice tut!
Can some one write a tutorial of setting up a code version control system locally using some open source tool?
I’m sure there are quite a lot of OS software are there. But never found a good tutorial of setting it up locally.
Best regards!
Damn! Not plus member yet…
Excellent tutorial.
I personally write off all these memberships and learning aids. And if you guys are making income from any of your web work should be doing the same.
Even if you don’t claim your income you find the same useless tutorial in every book at the book store with the exception of a few. These sites offer nothing but filtered quality and worth every penny. I’ve made back my money from these tutorials with clients 10 times over. Its called an INVESTMENT financially and technically.
Next time, just say “THANK YOU”
my 2 cents
Great tutorial for someone who’s new to PHP such as myself for me having the two seperate tutorials was more helpful than if they had been in one. So thank you sincerely!
I’ve got something like this up and going, but am curious if this allows you to use tab or up/down arrows to select what you’re searching for. The one I’ve got just allows a point and click.
If so, I may have to start paying for all this goodness.
Hi John, keyboard navigability was a big part of this tutorial. The tab, up and down, and escape keys can all be used to navigate (or close in the case of the escape key) the list of results and the enter key can be used (as is normal with an anchor) to navigate to pages the results link to.
I liked the tut but the audio was so bad I could hardly hear it, please fix this in upcoming tuts.
Other than that, nice!
Hi Erwin, apologies for the poor quality audio – it sounds fine on my system but I only have onboard sound so if you have a kick-ass sound card you may be able to easily hear the poor quality (sounds like a contradiction but you know what I mean right?!)
Also my mic sucks so that could be it.
I found that if the input levels were any higher than what they were set to for this tut some of my words were totally overblown…
will work on this for the next tut :D
im planning to buy the premium subscription to see if the information is worth !.Anyway , if you are looking for a nice tutorial to implement a search feature using php /mysql and jquery you can find a nice one here :
http://youhack.me/2010/04/28/creating-a-fancy-search-feature-with-php-mysql-and-jquery/
hope this help someone ! Happy coding .
i cant get it to work, and i used to have this when it first came out. don’t remember what i did. using mamp on os x, and connecting to localhost….
great tut btw!!!!!!!!
I think link is link, so no matter is follow or no follow…