The "Did you mean" feature

[lucy82m]

Hello, I want to add the 'did you mean' feature (like on Google) on my shareware site, where a lot of users have mistypes, and they get 0 results... so they exit the site very fast. Do you have any idea how I could implement such a thing? Does it require a dictionary or something? I found some scripts, but none of them gave relevant results... just stupid, irrelevant suggestions. Any help would be appreciated... sample code would be awesome.
Thanks, Lucy

[adamalton]

That's no easy task! Have you considered just putting a Google search form on your site though? I.e. a form that uses Google to search just within your site. It would be a lot easier!

[coolgames]

That's no easy task! Have you considered just putting a Google search form on your site though? I.e. a form that uses Google to search just within your site. It would be a lot easier!

yes, http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ that will help you (it does require some work do be done) or, you can use scripts that will be hosted right in your website like these:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/searchengine.shtml

[aktar]

The following functions will be of help to you. Look it up in your php manual

levenshtein()
soundex(),
similar_text(),
and metaphone().

[dlite922]

The following functions will be of help to you. Look it up in your php manual

levenshtein()
soundex(),
similar_text(),
and metaphone().

I was actually wondering what else is there besides soundex() , thanks for the quick and dirty list! I might use this for a government app.

DM

[lucy82m]

google custom search is not good for me... i want to display the results in my layout, using some special boxes....

anyway, am now trying levenstein, soundex, and also yahoo api. thanks.

[Markus]

The following functions will be of help to you. Look it up in your php manual

levenshtein()
soundex(),
similar_text(),
and metaphone().

*heads to php.net*

Thanks aktar!

[lucy82m]

OK, the winner is Yahoo Spelling Suggestion (which uses Yahoo API). This gives your site the possibility to suggest exactly what Yahoo Search suggests :cool: Awesome, I would say!

Here is a short summary about using it, if you guys want to use it too: it requires a Yahoo API key, which can be got free. It is limited to 5000 queries per day, so I suggest caching the suggestion (which I implemented, as my site has more then 5000 searches per day). The page returned by Yahoo needs to be parsed, and see if there is a suggestion given. This is a page that gives a suggestion, this is one that has no suggestion.

You can see it on my shareware site: link removed by moderator like "enail backup", "rgistry cleaner" or whatever you want. I also implemented a function to make bold italic the words that are different between the search query and the suggestion from Yahoo. ;)

If you need assistance on implementing this on your site, let me know.

Thanks, Lucy