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club-soda / club-soda-guide

Mindful Drinking Movement - Club Soda MVP 2.0
https://club-soda-guide-staging.herokuapp.com
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Fuzzy matching in search engine #601

Open jessyclubsoda opened 5 years ago

jessyclubsoda commented 5 years ago

As a user, I would like to have auto-complete suggestions, or some flexibility in spelling when using the search function, in order to maximise my chances of finding what I am looking for

I'm not entirely sure what the best process for going about this would be and what methods we would want to use, so any input here much appreciated!

nelsonic commented 5 years ago

@jessyclubsoda the best place to start would be with examples of what types of queries ( search terms) you would want to return the results.

jessyclubsoda commented 5 years ago

Having looked through the searches log database here are some examples of search issues I think our users are facing.

Searching for Becks when the brand name is Beck's

If you search for "beck" it will return the appropriate brand name but not if you search with the s included

There is a similar issue with Frobisher's, Lindeman's etc., so allowing our search functionality to exclude the need for apostrophes would be a good place to start

Searching for a postcode without the space

A number of searches that have come up is where users have searched for a full postcode without the space which won't return any results because all postcodes have to be formatted with an appropriate space.

Users also will have had similar issues around multi-word names which they may have accidentally elided - for example searching for "bigdrop" when they mean "Big Drop"

Misspelling something by one letter

Users have misspelled something by one letter on a couple of occasions. For example, searching for "Weatherspoons" when they were looking for Wetherspoons (this wouldn't actually return any results because we don't currently have them listed on the Guide but could be a future issue) or "shrub" when they're looking for shrb