[Xapian-discuss] Search queries with wildcards

Timo Haberkern thaberkern at emedia-office.de
Wed Dec 15 07:01:56 GMT 2004


Olly Betts wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 03:33:27PM +0100, Timo Haberkern wrote:
>  
>
>> i'm looking for a search engine for a new web appliaction that we are 
>> developing at the moment. I took a first look at xapian and it looks 
>> very promising. The only thing i need are searches with wildcards or 
>> matchin subpatterns. I test it with the index of the xapian online page.
>>
>> - If i use "install" as search query i get 1 match
>> - if i use "installing" as search query i get 3 matches
>>   
>
>
> Um, I get 14 matches for both "install" and "installing".
>  
>
ok my fault, it seemed that i messed something up.

> But anyway, it's easy enough to implement a wildcarded search if you
> wish.  Generally though, when people ask about wildcarded searching
> it's because they want to be able to search for different forms of
> the same word.  This is what stemming offers, and stemming is a better
> choice in general, since it understands the rules of the language.
> In some languages the base word changes as well as an ending being
> added, and wildcarding doesn't help you there.
>
> Wildcarding also often conflates totally unrelated words.  For example,
> a search "ball*" looking for information about balls will match "ballad",
> "ballet", and "ballyhoo" as well.
>  
>
A wild card search would be very great. In germany we have a lot of 
compound words. A pure stemmer base search didn't find a lot of matches. 
Think of the word "Fehlercode", if i use "Fehler" as a search query i 
wouldn't find the documents with Fehlercode in it, right? But i need 
such a solution. And wildcards seems to be the only solution.

How can the wildcard search be done? Do you have to develop something 
for that?


regards

Timo

> Cheers,
>    Olly
>
>
>  
>




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