How to write a multi criteria search script

[lnenad]

So let's assume i'm making a script for searching cars by different criteria. Name of the car, color, and mileage. I used to do this by using LIKE and just adding AND for as many times as needed. But i've read that that is obsolete and is giving servers a hard time, so i went ahead and started making a new script that will use fulltext search. I've hit a dead end.

 

   function search($table,$what,$string,$limit,$start,$country) {
   global $totrows;
   global $pages;
   $string = explode("*",$string);
   $what = explode("*",$what);
   $cname = trim($string[0]);
   $t = 0;
   $parameters = "";
   while (isset($what[$t])){
   if ($t>0) { $paramm .= ", "; }
   $paramm .= trim($what[$t]);
   if ($t>0) { $parama .= " "; }
   $parama .= trim($string[$t]);
   $t++;
   }
   $parameters .= " AND locationc = '".$country."'";
   $sql = "SELECT *, MATCH(".$paramm.") AGAINST('".$parama."') AS score FROM main WHERE MATCH(".$paramm.") AGAINST('".$parama."') ORDER BY score DESC";
   $result = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());
   while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
 var_dump($row);   
   
    }
   }

 

How does this work:

 

The user selects and enters his parameters>

The script then joins them all into a single variable which is then sent to the function(the reason i do this i because the user might input only the name, so that way i can add more criteria and not need to change the script)>

The script explodes those into arrays and then it processes them into a form for use with sql>

I run the sql query and then return the results.

 

What's the problem? There's two of them actually>

 

The first one is that mysql returns an error "Can't find FULLTEXT index matching the column list" even though i did setup fulltext indexes.

 

(phpmyadmin c/p)

name	FULLTEXT	No	No	name	0		YES	
color	FULLTEXT	No	No	color	0		YES	
mileage	FULLTEXT	No	No	mileage	0		YES	

 

 

The second problem is that the script is not selective and will not work as intended. For example, a car's name is 300, the users input's 300, and the script will return those rows that had mileage 300 or 300000 or whatever.

 

How do i fix this, and is FULLTEXT the right way to go with multi criteria search?