Oliver_Henniges - 6:53 am on Aug 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

Basically I'd support in the first place what FalseDawn said in msg #2. Nevertheless

For one client we had a custom routine written for "zero results" that pealed off the characters one at a time until there was a match. That's brute force and not so precise, but it does give some results.

is a very interesting idea. Beginning with php I thought the levenshtein function would provide some help, but in fact it doesn't really.

I was just thinking whether some "brute force lexical similarity" might work. Not as sophisticated as current state of LSI but perhaps simply some a-priori-calculated (and stored) value resulting from a discrete cosine transformation over the ascii-strings of the product description on the one hand and that of the searchphrase on the other might reveal significant matches. Don't forget that the lexical basis of the pool is already narrowed down heavily by the customer being on a specific site. Just an idea, my mathematical competence doesn't suffice to elaborate that in detail.