I'm looking for an open source PHP search engine or Spyder. Does anyone know of one? Or a basic code to run user input through a database and test for matches?
You have two conflicting requirments which makes you post look either like you haven't researched what you actually need, or you don't understand yourself. What is it you need to do rather then explain what you want. If you want to just "run user input through a database and test for matches" then thats a database. You can download mySQL which is open source. If you want a search engine, do you understand what this actually means? You can't run something like that on a shared dream host package for 9$. Anyway, continuing on, Lucene is an open source well developed search library. There are implmentations of it, such as Solr 1.4 Search Server.