Reputation: 35679

Dealing with spell check suggestions

We are trying to use Solr's spell check to do a "Did you mean?" type suggestion.

The problem we are having is that we are replacing the original term in the query with Solr's suggestions.

For example: a search for "10ks" (we are creating an events site) will return a suggestion of "5ks".

However, it seems the spell check is using "ks" rather than "10ks" as the term so when we replace "ks" with "5ks" we get 105ks. This then causes an infinite "did you mean" loop because Solr always uses "ks" rather than "10ks" in the spell check suggestions.

Here's the code that we use to replace suggestions in the original query.

    /// <summary>
    /// Method that takes the first suggestion for all the spelling and applys them to the keyword
    /// </summary>
    private string GetSuggestedQuery(string keyword, List<SpellCheck> suggestions)
    {
        if (suggestions != null)
        {
            for (var i = 0; i < suggestions.Count; i++)
            {
                keyword = keyword.Replace(suggestions.ElementAt(i).Query,
                                          suggestions.ElementAt(i).Suggestions.First());
            }
            return keyword;
        }
        return null;
    }

This works great for two word queries for example "runnig events" would get "running events".

The only thing I can think of is to do something naive like check for spaces in the original query and then replace the whole thing if the query contained spaces.

Upvotes: 0