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Phonetic String search for mis-spelled strings

 
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Hey Guys,

I have a web application that has a search page. When a user enters a search string, I query my Sql Server database for results.

However, if the user mis-spells a word in the search string...the database does not find anything. Does anyone know have to handle intelligent phonetic searches.

I'm CLUE-LESS, so I'll appreciate any insight...
 
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What you are talking about is not really the domain of database searches. You could implement this sort of logic with lots of like queries (or some such approach) but that just sounds like hard work. Instead, if you want free text searching, you might consider using Lucene which includes fuzzy searching.
 
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This is a problem I know alot about due to my work with a legal service firm transcribing documents where peoples names are spelled all sorts of ways. Actually it is an old problem in computing.

You have to do some extra work to create a list of phonetically encoded words and use that list to look up possible matches.

This servlet demos one solution based on the "metaphone" phonetic coding algorithm.

The Apache Commons Project has gathered several phonetic encoding scheme toolkits for free download.

Bill
 
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The Metaphone algorithm Bill mentions is very helpful. If the words (phrases, names, ...) are not English, have a look at DoubleMetaphone instead, which is also implemented by the Commons Codec library.

Another helpful algorithm for comparing words for similarity is the Levenshtein/Damerau Edit Distance.
 
Nina Anderson
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I found out the SQL Server already has the Full-Text search engine for this.

I hope it helps someone out their!!
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20010422.asp
 
William Brogden
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Just glancing at that SQL Server page, it appears that there is no provision for phonetic matching or any other handling of mis-spelled words.

Bill
 
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