What are some potential security considerations when implementing a search engine using PHP on a website?

One potential security consideration when implementing a search engine using PHP on a website is the risk of SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, you should always use prepared statements with bound parameters when querying the database in order to sanitize user input and prevent malicious SQL queries. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$search_query = $_GET['search_query'];
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM products WHERE name LIKE :search_query");
$stmt->bindParam(':search_query', $search_query, PDO::PARAM_STR);
$stmt->execute();
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting input validation prepared statements secure coding practices

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