Creating a good search engine

Hi Guys, I need to create a search engine that catalogs data from about 4 separate tables, and then of course is searchable from use input. I'm having a brain fart on how I should go about doing this. This is what I think I should do so far tell me if I'm right or at least going in the right direction. 1) Scan the each table and put them in one huge database filtering out "noise words" (I was thinking attaching a word id to the word so there would be no repeating words??) 2) Attach the wordID to the corresponding article or blurb. 3) Use the search function to search that table. Now hopefully that sounds about right I just have one other problem. I can't really envision the code to do the sorting of the words etc. Any useful pointers would be helpful not looking for a total solution rather a hint to get me started in the right direction. Hope you guys can help. -Mike de Libero mikede@soreye.com http://www.soreye.com