ecomconv - 1:15 am on Sep 28, 2011 (gmt 0)

There are two possible approaches on spelling issues in search:
- soundex (you have to build an algorithm based on soundex tables which compare and rank various misspellings of the same sound for each languages). Soundex works well with English names and words but if you have a lot of foreign brands or words like "Lamborghini", then problems start.
- Levenshtein works much better for all languages and proper names but good luck running Levenshtein on top of a database of more than a few hundred products in a timely manner. It's just a huge number of operations, queries and lookups. If you want to do Levenshtein on large product catalogs, you might want to check Exorbyte Commerce. That's the core of their system and they are affordable compared to building this on your own. They build an in-memory index of you catalog on the fly using product feeds.

Cheers,
Dan