"Did you mean" feature

lucym · 03-19-2008, 08:56 AM

Hello, I want to add the 'did you mean' feature (like on Google) on my shareware site, where a lot of users have mistypes, and they get 0 results... so they exit the site very fast. Do you have any idea how I could implement such a thing? Does it require a dictionary or something? I found some scripts, but none of them gave relevant results... just stupid, irrelevant suggestions. Any help would be appreciated... Sample source code would be gold

Thanks, Lucy

Izzmo · 03-19-2008, 11:12 AM

That's very hard to do, and it would have to be in a "learning mode" for a long time. You would have to basically create an AI so to speak. Learning how users misspell different words and then associate them to their right spellings. That's just single words. You need to then move to sentences/more than one words.

The best thing I would have to offer u is store a list of known/common/popular search terms in a database, then do a "find as you type" feature. That's very common now a days and can also be a HUGE help!

lucym · 03-20-2008, 08:02 AM

i have received recommendations to try Levenstein, Soundex, and Yahoo API. I hope that at least one will give acceptable results, as implementing AI seems much harder

Izzmo · 03-21-2008, 11:00 AM

API's seem intimidating, but if you know what you are doing, they are rather quite easy! API's from the SE's are especially geared towards developers, so they can be easy, or hard, depending on what you are good at. Google's was very simple for me to get used to.

lucym · 03-22-2008, 08:26 AM

OK, the winner is Yahoo Spelling Suggestion (which uses Yahoo API). This gives your site the possibility to suggest exactly what Yahoo Search suggests :cool: Awesome, I would say!

Here is a short summary about using it, if you guys want to use it too: it requires a Yahoo API key, which can be got free. It is limited to 5000 queries per day, so I suggest caching the suggestion (which I implemented, as my site has more then 5000 searches per day). The page returned by Yahoo needs to be parsed, and see if there is a suggestion given. This is a page that gives a suggestion, this is one that has no suggestion.

You can see it live on my shareware site: http://www.coredownload.com/ try some mistypes, like "enail backup", "rgistry cleaner" or whatever you want. I also implemented a function to make bold italic the words that are different between the search query and the suggestion from Yahoo.

If you need assistance on implementing this on your site, let me know.

Thanks, Lucy

Izzmo · 03-25-2008, 01:37 PM

The only downside of using this is that it uses Yahoo's Database. So, your site must be greatly integrated into Yahoo's system in order for it to work good. If Yahoo hasn't crawled your site much yet, it won't perform well.

lucym · 03-25-2008, 01:44 PM

no, i don't see a connection between yahoo crawling the site, and the use of the API. on a site that has disabled yahoo bot from robots.txt, this search suggestion would still work nice.

Izzmo · 03-26-2008, 11:57 AM

How is Yahoo able to populate the "suggested" list box then? I mean, unless it's pulling from their own database, I wouldn't see how.