in reply to Re^2: Module to provide suggested terms for search?
in thread Module to provide suggested terms for search?

And it's your job to disabuse them of that notion. Start with a thought experiment - "How much do you think Google paid to develop that feature?" Most people realize that Google has more money than God, so that might get them thinking...

-sam

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Re^4: Module to provide suggested terms for search?
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jun 29, 2008 at 05:59 UTC

    Nah. You were right before. It's not quite trivial but it's not that hard either. You have two fronts to attack it. Double metaphone, like you said before, and just load up a mirror of your DB index with metaphone versions. IMDb, for example, does this with actor names. And the other is just to run the search through aspell or ispell. If something is spelled wrong and is not found in the DB index, suggest correctly spelled terms that are known to be in the index.

    update: hadn't read ahead when I wrote this to see that creamygoodness also suggested Aspell already. Wasn't trying to steal any ideas. :)

      Sounds good. If you have the time, why not make it into a CPAN module? Could be a fun plugin for CGI::Application::Search.

      -sam

        An excellent idea and one (related, it was a tunable vector search engine) I had 5 years ago. One of several big projects that I have failed to get going. Sigh. At the time I wasn't a good enough hacker to generalize it for public consumption. Now that I have the chops I'm too busy to work on a(nother) big project. Though I do think it's a good idea and I think there was a CDBI auto-index module I could look at for approaches... So many fun ideas, so few tuits.