is there any way to get relevent result rather than result that must exactly match the queries using SQL?

Question

I'm a programmer and i wanted to get relevent result rather than exact result that matches my searches. Example you can type Allianes and get Alliances. Is there anyway to do it just by manipulating the SQL I am working with?

Answer 1

have you tried using LIKE?

ex: [ColumnName]LIKE'%searchWord%'

this has always return simular results to what you are searching for

Answer 2

I don't think you can do misspellings with out getting really indepth. If you wanted to do it where you can type alliance and get alliances... that would be pretty easy with a wild card. Unless you put a wildcard in between each letter???

Answer 3

to handle misspellings, no, but Yahoo has a spelling suggestions API you can use. To get relevant results, instead of full fields, you can use a full text index (at least in MySQL MyISAM tables, some DBs don't support it) which you can also use to sort by relevance.

Answer 4

if you are running MS SQL server then you have the option for full text indexing.

With Full text indexing you can get some more loose results like "word or phrase searching, proximity searches, inflectional matches (drive = drove) and revelance ranking (how close are the words)." [1]

Possilbe more info
http://www.developer.com/db/article.php/3446891

or

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=sql+full+text+index&meta=

Answer 5

It would help if you specified what kind of database you're running.
If Oracle - check out SOUNDEX function. It is limited, but worth a look.

Also, check this site about phonetic algorithms. If you're good - perhaps you could make one of your own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

If you really need it, and have money to spend to resolve this, there is a 3rd party product out there that has a lot of promises...

http://www.netrics.com/info/search/soundex2.shtml

Answer 6

Well, it depends on what you are programming in. There are a number of tried and tested algorithms that are fairly easy to implement, and I believe that java has a some package somewhere that can do this.

Answer 7

try using the like command..may work out..ur question is ??
like is basically used for pattern matching

Answer 8

You can download it from the link:

http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?winhttp