"sounds-like", "did you mean THAT" functionality using full text search in SQL Server 2005

Question

I have implemented full text search over SQL Server 2005 database using CONTAINSTABLE keyword. I was wondering is there a way to add a "sounds like" or google's "did you mean THAT" functionality if the original query yields no results.

Answer 1

The soundex for SQL Server is very limited and frustrating, I really recomend you to take a look at Lucene.net http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/. Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library, it is also very easy to use in .NET projects. If you need a serious search engine for you app go with Lucene.

Some features retrieved from http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/features.html:

• ranked searching, best results
• returned first many powerful query
• types: phrase queries, wildcard
• queries, proximity queries, range
• queries and more fielded searching (e.g., title, author, contents)
• ate-range searching sorting by any
• field multiple-index searching with
• merged results allows simultaneous
• update and searching