Tips for Twits

I always thought it was really cool to have those “Did you mean <some other spelling corrected word>”? Took me long enough to finally chance upon how it works! Basically it uses sound functions: soundex, metaphone or levenshtein distance to match words.

Different database supports different possible implementations of the functions. A sample mySQL query would look like:

SELECT `name` FROM `organizations` WHERE SOUNDEX(`name`) = SOUNDEX('dog');

I’ve also seen some mysql stored procs that hack in a levenshtein distance calculation algorithm. This allows a even more dynamic and accurate match. Unfortunately, i’ve never gotten it to work. Do let me know if anyone has succeeded.