How to use wildchards, fuzzy search with Solr?

Question

I use Solr for searching in my data and I recognized now that some of the solr search query language feature does not word for me. I miss these from the capabilities I have:

• fuzzy search
• wildchards * ? - I do not have stemming set up so far, this would be useful temporarily for searching
• field specification - currently I cannot tell search in title:Blabla

As far as I know these things should come by default in Solr, but I obviously don't have them. I use Solr 1.4. Here you can find my schema. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I googled for "solr fuzzy search" and I found your question here. Actually the version 4.0 of SOLR is capable of fuzzy search with a easy query syntax.

For example you can search for name:peter strict or with the tilde symbol name:peter~ as a fuzzy search. If you desire to restrict the fuzziness a little bit you can add a percentage in form of name:peter~0.7 ... this means you want to search for peter with a "sharpness" of 70%.

Answer 2

Your fieldType name="text" is missing a lot of filters. For reference, here's the text fieldType from the default schema.xml:

<!-- A text field that uses WordDelimiterFilter to enable splitting and matching of
    words on case-change, alpha numeric boundaries, and non-alphanumeric chars,
    so that a query of "wifi" or "wi fi" could match a document containing "Wi-Fi".
    Synonyms and stopwords are customized by external files, and stemming is enabled.
    -->
<fieldType name="text" class="solr.TextField" positionIncrementGap="100">
  <analyzer type="index">
    <tokenizer class="solr.WhitespaceTokenizerFactory"/>
    <!-- in this example, we will only use synonyms at query time
    <filter class="solr.SynonymFilterFactory" synonyms="index_synonyms.txt" ignoreCase="true" expand="false"/>
    -->
    <!-- Case insensitive stop word removal.
      add enablePositionIncrements=true in both the index and query
      analyzers to leave a 'gap' for more accurate phrase queries.
    -->
    <filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory"
            ignoreCase="true"
            words="stopwords.txt"
            enablePositionIncrements="true"
            />
    <filter class="solr.WordDelimiterFilterFactory" generateWordParts="1" generateNumberParts="1" catenateWords="1" catenateNumbers="1" catenateAll="0" splitOnCaseChange="1"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.SnowballPorterFilterFactory" language="English" protected="protwords.txt"/>
  </analyzer>
  <analyzer type="query">
    <tokenizer class="solr.WhitespaceTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.SynonymFilterFactory" synonyms="synonyms.txt" ignoreCase="true" expand="true"/>
    <filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory"
            ignoreCase="true"
            words="stopwords.txt"
            enablePositionIncrements="true"
            />
    <filter class="solr.WordDelimiterFilterFactory" generateWordParts="1" generateNumberParts="1" catenateWords="0" catenateNumbers="0" catenateAll="0" splitOnCaseChange="1"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.SnowballPorterFilterFactory" language="English" protected="protwords.txt"/>
  </analyzer>
</fieldType>

For example, the SnowballPorterFilterFactory is the one that enables stemming.

I recommend building your schema based on the default schema.xml, tweaking and modifying as necessary (as opposed to starting from scratch).

Here's the reference for analyzers, tokenizers and filters.