kk thanks Niche,I have already tried this but,its not working for me... this is my code -------------<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /><title>Pincode search</title> </head><body><form method="post"action="index.php"><input type="hidden" name="submitted"value="true"/><label>search category:<select name="category"><option value="PINCODE">PINCODE</option><option value="AREANAME">AREANAME</option><option value="STATE">STATE</option><option value="COUNTRY">COUNTRY</option></select></label><label>search criteria:<input type="text" name="criteria"/></label><input type="submit"/></form> <iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=<?php echo "$PINCODE,+$AREANAME,+$STATE,+$COUNTRY";?>&sll=55.953252,-3.188267&sspn=0.180682,0.591202&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Edinburgh,+City+of+Edinburgh,+United+Kingdom&t=m&z=2&iwloc=A&output=embed"></iframe><br /><small><a href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=Edinburgh+uk&aq=&sll=55.953252,-3.188267&sspn=0.180682,0.591202&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=<?php echo "$PINCODE,+$AREANAME,+$STATE,+$COUNTRY";?>,+United+Kingdom&t=m&z=2&iwloc=A" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map</a></small><?phpif(isset($_POST['submitted'])){include('connect.php'); $category =$_POST['category'];$criteria =$_POST['criteria'];$query ="SELECT * FROM pincodesearch WHERE $category LIKE '%".$criteria."%'";$result = mysqli_query($dbcon,$query) or die(mysqli_error());$num_rows =mysqli_num_rows($result);echo"$num_rows results found";echo"<table>";echo"<tr> <th>PINCODE</th> <th>AREANAME</th> <th>STATE</th><th style='text-align:right'>COUNTRY</th></tr>";while ($row=mysqli_fetch_array($result,MYSQLI_ASSOC)){echo "<tr><td>";echo $row['PINCODE'];echo"</td><td>";echo $row['AREANAME'];echo"</td><td>";echo $row['STATE'];echo"</td><td>";echo $row['COUNTRY'];echo"</td><tr>";}echo"</table>"; } ?> </body></html> please help..........