Re: Fuzzy string matching of product names

> I've got a similar problem in my 18th century research, when clerks usually
> took pride in being able to spell a name in any number of ways. I've landed on
> a solution where I'm sending search strings to SIMILAR TO. I usually get far
> too many hits, but it's much easier to browse through 100 hits than the entire
> dataset which is approaching 60,000 records.
>
> Optimizing the search strings is based upon a lot of experience.

That sounds like an interesting problem - mine sounds mundane in comparison.

I now seem to be getting reasonable results with pg_trgm coupled with
ILIKE. I ORDER BY description ILIKE '%%usr_str%%' DESC,
similarity(description, 'usr_str') DESC , prioritising products that
actually contain the user specified string. I have tweaked the "is
greater than similarity" of my queries, to include a bit of rubbish to
be on the safe side, but not too much. I've done this with what I
believe to be a representative dataset. You can create a GiST or GIN
index on text fields for these queries, which is nice.

Have you tried using pg_trgm with your dataset? You might have more
success. It isn't biased towards a particular natural language. Also,
I suggest you avoid SQL regular expressions (which are supported with
SIMILAR TO), and use the ~ operator instead, which gives you the more
powerful POSIX regular expressions, unless portability is a major
concern.

Regards,
Peter Geoghegan