smart search by first/last name

I have to build a search facility capable of searching members by their first name/last name and may be some other search parameters (i.e. address).

The search should provide a list of match candidates so that the user can select whatever he/she seems the "correct" match.

The search should be smart enough so that the "correct" result would be among the first few items on the list. The search should also be tolerant to typos and misspellings and, may be, even be aware of name shortcuts i.e. Bob vs. Robert or Bill vs. William.

I started investigating Lucene and the family (like elastic search) as a tool for the job. While it has an impressive array of features addressing similar problems for the full text search, I am not so sure how to use them for my task - up to the point that maybe Lucene is not the right tool here at all.

What do you guys think - how can I harness Elastic Searc开发者_如何学Goh to solve my problem? Or should I look elsewhere?

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Lucene supports edit distance queries so that your search query will tolerate some typos, you define this as the allowed edit distance for a term.

for instance:

name:johnni~0.8

would return "johnny"

Also Solr provides a wide array of ready made search filters and analyzers you can use for search. In your case I would probably chain several filter factories together:

• TrimFilterFactory - trim the query
• LowerCaseFilterFactory - to get rid of case differences
• ISOLatin1AccentFilterFactory - to remove accents from letters (most people don't search with the accent anyway)
• PhoneticFilterFactory - for matching sounds like queries like: kris -> chris

look at the documentation under the link it is pretty straight forward how to set up a new solr instance with an Analyzer that uses all the above filters. I used something similar for searching city names and it worked fairly well.

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Lucene can be made tolerant of typos and misspellings, and can use synonyms. As for

The search should be smart enough so that the "correct" result would be among the first few items on the list

Are there any search engines which don't try to do this?

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As far as Bob/Robert goes, that can be done with synonyms, but you need to get the synonym data from some reliable source.

In addition to what @Asaf mentioned, you might try to use N-gram indexing to deal with spelling variants. See the CJKAnalyzer for an example of how to do that.