[Developers] RFE: fuzzy search

[Andi Vajda]

On Fri, 18 Jul 2008, Shug Boabby wrote:

> This RFE got lost in one of my posts from a few days ago. Copied here.
>
> It would be awesome to be able to send off a "fuzzy text match" query.
> I tend to use combinations of "a:key~=" etc, but it would be really
> really good to be able to basically do a search engine style search
> across the keys that can perhaps do simple things like stemming of
> words, removal of stop words, rearranging words, minor spelling
> corrections, alternative words and arbitrary dropping of some words in
> longer queries... like one would expect from a search bar. I believe
> Apache Lucene does much of this. As a solid example, I would like it
> if a search for "smashin pumpkins" [sic] would return "The Smashing
> Pumpkins", or if a search for "The Queen of England" would include
> Elizabeth_II_of_the_United_Kingdom" along with
> "Elizabeth_I_of_England".

The Freebase search server is Lucene-based and implements a lot of this 
already. See http://www.freebase.com/api/service/search for more 
information.

Andi..