Similar Search Results - FULLTEXT or Algorithm

[SC]

Ok, first of all I'm sure that what I want to do isn't going to be easy...



I'd like to be able to take user input and query the database to return
exact and similar results. I have added a FULLTEXT index of the column I
want to search to the table. Then taking user input and break it apart into
separate words and use something like:



MATCH (table) AGAINST ('*word1*' '*word2*' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS Score



in my SELECT and then ORDER BY Score DESC and that works pretty good, but
I'd like to factor in misspellings, abbreviations, etc. I have searched to
see if I could find code for an existing algorithm that I could try, but all
I have found are articles talking about different algorithms and no actual
code.



Any help, suggestions, ideas, links to code, etc would be greatly
appreciated.



Thanks

[willl69]

Re: Similar Search Results - FULLTEXT or Algorithm

Hi

I am having the same sort of problem, and surprisingly nobody has been
able to give me any help. However i've used the levenshtein() or
soundex() to give a reasonable accurate search of words exactly like and
'sound like' a word entered into a search field. Depending on the size of
your database to be searched, this may be a viable option. As it does need
every word entered into the search field to be matched against every word
in every field in the database that you want to search to get an accurate
result, it would be slow on larger sized databases.

I dont know if this helps but its the best i come across for the same
problem

Cheers

Will