Fuzzy search

dominant

Hello

Has anyone tried to develop fuzzy search?

I mean something like the www.imdb.com

Any idea?

devinemke

use the LIKE operator in your query

dzysyak

Can you explain what problem do you want to resolve? I can not suggest search implementation throght LIKE operator. Better use full text search (look mysql manual for details).

dominant

Well, if someone type wether or whather, then it should match against the word weather.

dzysyak

I have only one idea for now. I have seen that in one of gaim modules. General idea is to replace "wrong" words to correct ones. So, in your case you probably will need a vocabulary of replacements wrong->correct and you can check the words before search or after the search if nothing found. Or mix both results.

dominant

any relevant link?

dzysyak

Sorry, I do not have a link. That is just an idea, if somebody can suggest other ideas I will be glad to know. Subject is quite interesting. Gaim is a desctop application (messenger).

greenie2600

See:

the levenshtein() function
the pspell library

dzysyak

Great idea! I have just found some code by your link. I think you ment something similar.


<?php
$pspell_link = pspell_new("en");

if (!pspell_check($pspell_link, "testt")) {
    $suggestions = pspell_suggest($pspell_link, "testt");

foreach ($suggestions as $suggestion) {
    echo "Possible spelling: $suggestion<br />";
}
}
?>

Here is the page where I have found it - link.

As far as I understand the main problem is to get a list of possible words.

greenie2600

If you just want to check against the English dictionary, you can use pspell's built-in dictionary, I think.