#3848 - Metaphonic search indexing

Identifier #3848
Issue type Feature request or suggestion
Title Metaphonic search indexing
Status Closed (rejected)
Handling member Chris Graham
Addon search
Description By making use of the PHP 'metaphone' function we could allow the search engine to be more tolerant of spelling mistakes.

The metaphone function reduces spelling to a simplified phonetic spelling that captures the broad sound but in a much denser way (i.e. less room for subtle alternatives).

For example, the metaphone() of the word "javascript" returns the string: JFSKRPT.
For example. Composr would return KMPSR and Conposr would return KNPSR. Even if you typed Composer and Conposer the phonetic results are the same as without the 'e' (KMPSR, KNPSR) - a good example of the aforementioned tolerance for mistakes.

To implement this, we'd need to introduce metaphonic indexing, similar to full-search indexing. Search terms would be converted to their metaphone-equivalent, then compared to entries in the index.
Steps to reproduce

Additional information The YouTube video where I discovered this little known/used function @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yuj1wDMlZc0
A tutorial which uses the equally obscure levenshtein function to return the minimum number of modified characters to further enhance results @ https://www.codepunker.com/blog/implement-a-sounds-like-search-in-php
Related to

#3288 - Major overhaul of fulltext search support, the "Composr fast custom index"
Funded? No
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