: Thanks. I know I'll be able to utilize some of Solr's free text
: searching capabilities in other search types in this project. The
: product manager wants this particular search to exactly mimic LIKE%.
...
: Ex: If I search "Albatross" I want "Albert" to be excluded completely,
: rather than having a low score.
please be specific about the types of queries you want. ie: we need more
then one example of the type of input you want to provide, the type of
matches you want to see for that input, and the type of matches you want
to get back.
in your first message you said you need to match company titles "pretty
exactly" but then seem to contradict yourself by saying the SQL's LIKE
command fit's the bill -- even though the SQL LIKE command exists
specificly for in-exact matches on field values.
Based on your one example above of Albatross, you don't need anything
special: don't use ngrams, don't use stemming, don't use fuzzy anything --
just search for "Albatross" and it will match "Albatross" but not
"Albert". if you want "Albatross" to match "Albatross Road" use some
basic tokenization.
If all you really care about is prefix searching (which seems suggested by
your "LIKE%" comment above, which i'm guessing is shorthand for something
similar to "LIKE 'ABC%'"), so that queries like "abc" and "abcd" both
match "abcdef" and "abcdzzzz" but neither of them match "xxxxabcdyyyy"
then just use prefix queries (ie: "abcd*") -- they should be plenty
efficient for your purposes. you only need to worry about ngrams when you
want to efficiently match in the middle of a string. (ie: "TITLE LIKE
%ABC%")
-Hoss
