"Did you mean" feature

[lucym]

Hello, I want to add the 'did you mean' feature (like on Google) on my shareware site, where a lot of users have mistypes, and they get 0 results... so they exit the site very fast. Do you have any idea how I could implement such a thing? Does it require a dictionary or something? I found some scripts, but none of them gave relevant results... just stupid, irrelevant suggestions. Any help would be appreciated... sample code would be great.
Thanks, Lucy

[ryanhellyer]

Hmm, sounds complicated/difficult to implement.

How are controlling the search feature of your site at the moment?

[lucym]

I tried manual adding of suggestions, parsing of Google results (which surely isn't a good solution)... now am testing Soundex, Levenstein, and Yahoo API... I hope one of them will solve the problem.

[lucym]

OK, the winner is Yahoo Spelling Suggestion (which uses Yahoo API). This gives your site the possibility to suggest exactly what Yahoo Search suggests Awesome, I would say!

Here is a short summary about using it, if you guys want to use it too: it requires a Yahoo API key, which can be got free. It is limited to 5000 queries per day, so I suggest caching the suggestion (which I implemented, as my site has more then 5000 searches per day). The page returned by Yahoo needs to be parsed, and see if there is a suggestion given. This is a page that gives a suggestion, this is one that has no suggestion.

You can see it live on my shareware site: CoreDownload.com - Download Shareware and Freeware Software try some mistypes, like "enail backup", "rgistry cleaner" or whatever you want. I also implemented a function to make bold italic the words that are different between the search query and the suggestion from Yahoo.

If you need assistance on implementing this on your site, let me know.

Thanks, Lucy