Searching Issues

• Features

  • Phrase Searching

    • Names and common phrases often wanted

    • Do not limit to only exact phrase matching

  • Boolean AND and NOT, + and -, quotes ("")

  • Natural-Language Search

• Example: "How much does the party set cost?"

• Small % of webwide searches are natural language

• Advanced Features

  • Proximity ("Near")

  • Parentheses (red AND rose) OR "American Beauty"

  • Stemming (run, running, runner)

  • Similarity, "More Like This"

• Thesaurus

  • Alternate spellings

    • color & colour

    • super bowl & superbowl

    • 40 & fourty

  • Technical terms

    • hives vs. urticaria

  • Options for synonym searching

    • table settings vs. tableware

• Speed & Caching

  • Even big results should return in 10 seconds or less

  • Overbuild for the current need - sites always grow

  • Think about scalability & multiple servers

  • Common searches ("Pamela Anderson") may be cached for faster response