a canadian startup

Improving Search — PHP, pspell, and Google-like “Did you mean?”

This is cool.

One of my favourite upcoming features in the new Well.ca is improved search.

With more than 3000 products, we can make navigation really good but search has to be the dominant way to find products.

More accurate search results means more people will find what they’re looking for. That translates into more conversions and happier customers.

Our current search sucks. The suckiest part is how it does spell check. Medical words and the names of drugs are hard to spell. Words like “Aspirin”, “Reactine”, “Immodium”, and “Hemorrhoids” are not easy to spell. I am not sure I spelled them correctly just now.

So way-back-when I hacked up a solution using levenshtein distance–it calculates the proximity between words based on permutations.

Right now, searching for “ali asaria is my best friend” results in:

NO!

chris, the new lead developer at well.ca, did some wicked hacking to use php’s pspell to do a much better spell check. many people on the net have been searching for a way to implement a method similar to google’s “Did you mean?” feature on their search pages using PHP. chris’s way of creating a custom dictionary for pspell is the best way i know to do it.

if you’re interested in doing a google-like “Did you Mean?” feature in PHP on your search page, read chris’s post on how he implemented it.