How to approach "questions that may already have your answer"?

Question

In StackOverflow, while I type, I get suggestions of questions that may be of interest to me.

I would like to reproduce this feature on another site. My questions are in a AWS RDS MySQL InnoDB Database. My site is in PHP (Yii, running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk).

Would I be better off to use MySQL directly? Lucene? AWS CloudSearch? ElasticSearch? Or some other technology I don't know about?

(I'm not worried about the client-side, jQuery UI or other tricks will work fine).

Since I may one day want to create a full blown search engine, I thought maybe CloudSearch is a good idea. But maybe it's overkill for what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

I would use a JavaScript (jQuery) solution that queries after each character typed and searches for questions alike. You'll find out that, in the first stage, the technique not really matters. When building your full blown search engine, you could decide to use an index like CloudSearch.