How does google do the "did you mean...."?

Rails
1

I have a search on my website that search names, so I know all of the
values they could enter. How do I do something like google where if I
type jonson it would say “did you mean johnson”?

Any ideas?

Thanks.

2

On Jun 17, 9:33 pm, Ben J. [email protected]
wrote:

I have a search on my website that search names, so I know all of the
values they could enter. How do I do something like google where if I
type jonson it would say “did you mean johnson”?

Any ideas?

Thanks.

–
Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

there’s several ways: Levenshtein distance, soundex, Metaphone and
Phonex algo’s. There’ve been threads on “spelling correction” here
and in rubytalk.

3

A bunch of useful stuff: http://text.rubyforge.org/

4

[email protected] wrote:

Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

there’s several ways: Levenshtein distance, soundex, Metaphone and
Phonex algo’s. There’ve been threads on “spelling correction” here
and in rubytalk.

I actually tried soundex, the problem is that I’m dealing with parts of
the string in the database, not the entire string. There is not split()
function for mysql. Example:

A person types “red sox” and my field has “boston red sox”, soundex
would not detect that.

I’m trying to do this all in a query, for performance reasons, but this
seems to be nearly impossible sicnce mysql does not have a split()
function for strings.

5

Have you looked at SOLR or other full text search plug-ins.

Michael

6

Quoting Ben J. [email protected]:

I have a search on my website that search names, so I know all of the
values they could enter. How do I do something like google where if I
type jonson it would say “did you mean johnson”?

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Pete Norvig explains how he did it:
http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

–
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to the amount of work, I usually need 10 days to answer)

7

There’s also a plugin for the feature:

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_suggest

–
Benjamin C.
http://www.bencurtis.com/ – blog
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/rails-ecommerce – build e-commerce
sites with Rails