Re: full text searching

At 11:40 AM 07-02-2001 -0600, Thomas T. Thai wrote:
>On 7 Feb 2001, Gunnar R|nning wrote:
>>
>> Since we're only doing exact searches, the index is utilized. But the
>> quality isn't good enough - I would love to have language sensitive
>> searches. "car" should match "cars" but not cartography and "ship"
>> should/could match "boat" etc.
>
>you can use ispell prefix/suffix for searching base words.

Sometimes I want it literal too. e.g. I'm searching for car I want car and
nothing else.

What I figured first was to create yet another dictionary of meanings.

Where ship is converted to meaning1 (verb), meaning2 (noun), etc.
And boat is converted to meaning2 (noun).

But then boat is not really the same as ship. So they should actually be
separate meanings maybe linked by a weight. Maybe we should make use of
Postgresql's polygon stuff, and stick a boat polygon somewhere where it
intersects a ship polygon and a canoe polygon.

In the end it seems too complex. I'm starting to think it may be better to
keep things literal but fast, and do the smart stuff at the client (do
multiple searches if necessary).

Cheerio,
Link.