[ic] "Fuzzy" searching

[Bill Carr]

On Mar 28, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Grant wrote:

> Has anyone implemented Swish or any other method for "fuzzy"
> searching?  Swish describes fuzzy searching this way:
>
> Word stemming, soundex, metaphone, and double-metaphone indexing for
> "fuzzy" searching
>
> I'm mainly interested in dealing with the plural/singular problem.
I rolled my own based on Lingua::Stem and Unicode::Normalize (I've  
got a lot of diacritic marks in the wine names).

The basic strategy I'm using is to come up with a method for  
normalizing the data. I mainly use the perl modules above to do that.  
I place the normalized data in a column in my products table named  
search_blob with a FULLTEXT index. When a user conducts a search I  
run their query  input through my normalization method and see if it  
matches my search_blob. I'd be happy to give more details as needed  
if this looks like a strategy that could work for you.

Bill Carr
Bottlenose - Wine & Spirits eBusiness Specialists
(877) 857-6700
http://www.bottlenose-wine.com