# Similar words **URL:** \ **Category:** Ferret\ **Created:** [June 11, 2008, 12:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/similar-words/140153 "2008-06-11T12:38:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/dec6dc/32.png) [@quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quik77)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2008, 12:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/similar-words/140153/1 "2008-06-11T12:38:43Z")
Is there a way to get a list of similar words to the ones a user has searched for? So if they search for (in my case) transferaze which has no matches I can get back an array like this [‘transferase’] ? I know I can just add ~ on the end to make it fuzzy, but what I’d like is to be able to say “Sorry, no matches for ‘transferaze’. Did you mean ‘transferase’ (310 matches)?” Ideally I’d like to get the number of matches for those similar words, but I know I could just do a search for each of those to get it. Is this possible? -Rob ---
**Author:** ![quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/dec6dc/32.png) [@quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quik77)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2008, 1:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/similar-words/140153/2 "2008-06-11T13:45:42Z")
> Ideally I’d like to get the number of matches for those similar words, but I > know I could just do a search for each of those to get it. And I think it might have to boil down to that really. If you want to get a the _number of results_ for ‘transferase’ when someone searches for ‘transferaze’, then it means you’ll need to hit the index once more with ‘transferase’ in separate. ---
**Author:** ![quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/dec6dc/32.png) [@quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quik77)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2008, 1:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/similar-words/140153/3 "2008-06-11T13:46:18Z")
Is there a way to get a list of results so that you also get, for each result, the phrase that was successfully matched? If so, you could shove all the results into a hash, with the keys being the matched phrase (and the value for each being an array of results), and return the asked-for key’s array along with the key and value size for the largest other array. just thinking aloud…i’d like to be able to do this as well, i don;t know if you can get back that info though. 2008/6/11 Julio Cesar O. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid): ---
**Author:** ![quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/dec6dc/32.png) [@quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quik77)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2008, 1:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/similar-words/140153/4 "2008-06-12T01:27:38Z")
So the problem you have is where to pull recommendations from. For my own needs, I use a spell checker to do the “did you mean”, which means my data source is external, and thus I never hit the index twice. As you seem to want to correlate the user’s input with _existing_ entries in your index, then I still think you’ll need to hit the index twice, one using the analyzers you’d normally use, and another with a fuzzy query. To help scaling things, you could have 2 indexes. But that’s another story. ---
**Author:** ![quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/dec6dc/32.png) [@quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quik77)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2008, 3:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/similar-words/140153/5 "2008-06-11T15:05:09Z")
> And I think it might have to boil down to that really. If you want to > get a the _number of results_ for ‘transferase’ when someone searches > for ‘transferaze’, then it means you’ll need to hit the index once > more with ‘transferase’ in separate. > I’m happy to do that if that’s the only way to do that, but that’s > really a secondary issue. Imagine I have in my index the following terms: abcd abce abcf and I search for abca I’d get 0 matches. What I’d like is to be able to present to the user: No matches found for ‘abca’. Did you mean ‘abcd’, ‘abce’, or ‘abcf’ ? So I need Ferret to have method call that would return [‘abcd’, ‘abce’, ‘abcf’]. Is this possible? -Rob ---
**Author:** ![quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/q/dec6dc/32.png) [@quik77](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/quik77)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2008, 1:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/similar-words/140153/6 "2008-06-12T13:55:25Z")
> So the problem you have is where to pull recommendations from. For my > own needs, I use a spell checker to do the “did you mean”, which means > my data source is external, and thus I never hit the index twice. > No 🙂 I definitely need to pull the recommendations from the Ferret index (or reimplement this bit of Ferret in Ruby). I can’t use spell checker with an ordinary dictionary because the terms that are stored in my index (which is an index of Protein Databank File headers among other things) are often not ordinary words. I _could_ build my own dictionary of all the words that are indexed, then loop through those and compute the levenstein distance for each - but that’s obviously what query~ does (it must query a Ferret dictionary to find the matches with a levenstein distance less than foo, then create a query that does word1 or word2 or word 3…), so it seems extraordinarily silly (not to mention slow) to reimplement (in Ruby) something that is already in Ferret. My question really is whether access to this information is exposed throught the Ferret API. I think a Ferret developer is needed to answer this question. > I’m very surprised that I’m the first person (AFAICT from searching the mailing list archive) to ask this question. -Rob