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...
Thanks, Lucy

What you can do is add in a dictionary, and then check the query against the dictionary to see if they're similar.

I would compare via either the Metaphone or the Levenshtein algorithms.

yes, i am now trying the Levenstein and Soundex.

Metaphone generally is more accurate than Soundex, or at least that's what the PHP book I have says.

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

Cool!

That's awesome! I need to try that out sometime!