How To Perform Key Word Search in Tables? - MySQL FAQs - Managing Tables and Running Queries with PHP Scripts

The simplest way to perform key word search is to use the SELECT statement with a LIKE operator in the WHERE clause. The LIKE operator allows you to match a text field with a keyword pattern specified as '%keyword%', where (%) represents any number of any characters. Any single quote (') in the keyword needs to be protected by replacing them with two single quotes (''). The tutorial exercise below shows you how to search for records whose "notes" contains "e":

<?php
  include "mysql_connection.php";

  $key = "e";
  $key = str_replace("'", "''", $key);
  $sql = "SELECT id, url, notes FROM fyi_links"
    . " WHERE notes LIKE '%".$key."%'";
  $rs = mysql_query($sql, $con);
  while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($rs)) {
    print($row['id'].", ".$row['url'].", "
    . $row['notes']."\n");
  }
  mysql_free_result($rs);

  mysql_close($con); 
?>

If you run this script, you will get something like this:

102, dba.fyicenter.com, Nice site.
202, www.yahoo.com, It's another search engine!
301, netscape.com, Added long time ago!
302, myspace.com, Added today!