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I am building a search where I need to implement couple of features in it among others.

1- It should bring all synonyms, like if someone searches for couch, it should bring in matching results for that couch plus linguistic matches like (sofas, cushions etc). To accomplish that I am using Full Text Search.

In my query I use FreeText but it does not yield the required results. That's what I do,

select * from Furn_Products Where FreeText(FurnName, 'Couch');

It should bring Names containing Cushions, Sofa and Couch off course but it only brings Names with Couch which I could also do by simple Like query. Any solutions?

2- I need to check for typos, like if someone types soofa, it should bring in results for sofa, couch etc.

Any tips, ideas on how to achieve this? Thanks in advance.

p.campbell
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Ashar Syed
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3 Answers3

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I agree with Nelson, there are lots of open-source search engines already out there, and they have gone through a lot of debugging. The biggest ones are Lucene/Solr, Sphinx, and Xapian.

Also, be careful when adding synonym expansion. If you expand paddle, for example, to bat, you might get a lot of zoological results you don't want. If you're doing automated queries. find some examples and set up a test suite with corner cases. If you expect to have human users, find a couple who will walk you through their processes to help build your test suite, and plan to get very friendly with the search logs. Best of luck!

avirr
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As far as I know, Full Text Search doesn't give you access to all the possible words (stemming, etc.). But starting with SQL Server 2008 you can get a list of all the indexed words.

For more features you would probably have to go with a 3rd party indexer like Lucene.

Nelson Rothermel
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You can explicitly define matches by configuring the thesaurus.

Ishmael
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