[hibernate-dev] Hibernate web search

[Adam Warski]

Hello,

> I like the idea of a parser using the Google syntax (you don't have  
> to disable explicit fields BTW - recognzing a term:term syntax  
> should be doable). The hard problem to crack is what's behind. I  
> explain that in Hibernate Search in Action, a lot of good search  
> engine do searches in tiers:
> - exact search
> - phonetic search
> - fuzzy search
> - replace ANDs with ORs
In one application, where I indexed relatively short names (but they  
could contain spaces etc), along with each name I also indexed a  
special version, which was one term, with all spaces converted to _  
(so the name "Foo Bar" became "foo_bar". When the user submitted the  
query, I also created a special version of his query in the same way,  
and added a fuzzy search on that - and this gave quite good results.

> I guess you can simulate part of it by boosting exact fields as  
> opposed to approximation fields in the multi field query parser.  
> This was not really possible until recently but the  
> SearchFactory.getAnalyzer(MyEntity.class) makes it much easier.
Right :) I think it would require some fine-tuning, but once we have  
the query parsed to "our" representation (or maybe we could reuse the  
parsed tree Lucene produces) we can manipulate it as we want. And the  
output we produce could be configurable (which tiers to include, with  
what boost factors etc.)

> We should add the Google like feature to the 3.2 list amongst other  
> higher level query enhancement like spell checking.
> Who wants to take the lead? I have always considered grammar and  
> parser developments awkward for my tastes :)
Well, I could do it, if my boss (Mark Newton) and you agree, unless  
there's somebody from the Hibernate team taking care of it :)

-- 
Adam