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Desirable Search Engine Capabilities

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Following are some advanced search engine capabilities that you’ll want to try to support.
Fuzzy matches are matches that don’t fit the search query exactly but would probably be interesting to the user to a certain extent.

For instance, if I look for “per food” and there are no matches at all, there’s a high probability I’ll be interested in documents about “dog food” or “cat food” or “feeding you furry companions.”

Spell-correction allows you to find matches even if the searcher spelled something wrong or the document spelled something wrong. If I search for “weird events” [sic], I want the search engine to find documents with the phrase “weird events.”

Alternate spellings refers to the ability to find permissible alternate spellings of terms, such as some very common British and American alternate spellings: “color” and “color,” “grey,” “organisation” and “organization.” When people search for one, they are usually interested in the other as well.

Synonyms are alternate terms with the same meaning. When someone searches for “dogs,” they would usually be interested in “canines” and “puppies,” although perhaps to a lesser extent. A smart search engine expands the scope of its search to recognize synonyms and related terms.

Stem words are root words, that is, versions of words without any prefixes or suffixes. When people search for “anarchist,” often they will also want to find “anarchy” or “anarchism,’ so the search engine needs to understand how to handle different word forms, how to strip prefixes and suffixes, and, more than anything, how to handle singular and plural forms of words. This can be extremely difficult in general because someone searching for “democrat” is not necessarily the least bit interested in documents about “democracy.”

Stop words are terms that are deliberately not indexed in the search engine. These typically include function words (determiners, conjunctions, prepositions) such as “the,” “and,” and “of,” and include terms that are so common as to be of limited use. For instance, the terms “web” or “home” don’t tend to contribute to a search of web pages because they are so common.

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