How to query parts of a PHP variable separately?

I am making a search bar in HTML/PHP/JS/MySQL. With the code I have right now, if someone enters the value book 1: conquest into the search bar, the SQL query looks for a column value of ALL the words in the search bar.

But, If someone spells a word wrong in the search bar, or enters Conquest instead of conquest, they will get the dreaded no results found result. But, every other search bar I’ve came across doesn’t suffer from this problem. Is it possible to change this?

<?php
  define("DB_HOST", "localhost");
  define("DB_NAME", "officiallasereyeswebsite");
  define("DB_CHARSET", "utf8");
  define("DB_USER", "root");
  define("DB_PASSWORD", "");
  $search = $_GET['search'];
  $pdo = new PDO(
    "mysql:host=".DB_HOST.";charset=".DB_CHARSET.";dbname=".DB_NAME,
    DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, [
      PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
      PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE => PDO::FETCH_ASSOC
    ]);

  $stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM `items` WHERE `item` LIKE ? OR `code` LIKE ?");
  $stmt->execute(["%".$search."%", "%".$search."%"]);
  $results = $stmt->fetchAll();
  if (isset($_GET["ajax"])) { echo json_encode($results); }
?>