Noob question: I hacked together my little mobile website and am looking to cut down on search time for a "similar search" I built.

Short Description: Each "unit" has x attributes in the form of strings (tags). Searching queries a database using a standard mysql regexp search for each tag across all "units" and sorts responses by # of tags matching Desc.

I know this isn't StackOverflow so this isn't really a tech question. What I want to know is if the problem is just that I'm a noob (just learned to code/do web development in the past few months) and need to learn more about data structures or if that's just the nature of php/mysql regexp queries (if its a database structure issue, let's not even get into it lol)