[WEB4LIB] Re: A lesson to be learnt from the britannica site?

[Avi Rappoport]

At 11:30 AM -0800 11/24/1999, Bob Rasmussen wrote:
>
>It sounds like what you're looking for is a "soundex" system. As I understand
>it, these were developed by the phone companies quite some time ago to aid in
>looking up people's names. Each name is indexed using a particular phonetic
>alphabet. To search for a name, it was first reduced to that same phonetic
>alphabet, and a search was made. Since the alphabet removed ambiguities such
>as between "c" and "s" (at least in English), and double letter, you ended up
>getting what you wanted a high percentage of the time.
>
>I do not know whether anyone has applied this technology to either catalog
>searching or web searching. One intriguing possibility would be to use
>technology on a PC to "spell-check" an entry (at least for words other than
>proper names), and then forward the corrected data to the host.

Many search engines have included soundex or phonetic searching, 
which (like many others) is both a blessing and a curse.  It's great 
for misspelled names, but I've had cases where a search for "foo" 
retrieved "via".

Avi
________________________________________________________________
Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Maven: <mailto:avirr at lanminds.com>
Guide to Site Indexing and Local Search Engines: <http://www.searchtools.com>