Hi folks,
I've been thinking of how I can improve the ability of my users to find people's names in a system that has over 30,000 people in it.
I've looked at soundex, and I've considered munging names to remove spaces, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. The thing about those approaches is that in order to be efficient, they require pre-processing all of the names in the system and storing the results, which can then be queried to find matches.
Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require.
I'm looking for suggestions on how to produce results that include close matches on last names that doesn't require pre-processing.
I've played with various schemes to assign "weights" to matches based on the number of matching letters, but they all end up being very slooooow and also producing too many false positives.
I suppose there are no easy answers, but if anyone has an algorithm for this kind of thing that they would be willing to share, I'd be grateful.
Thanks.
Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org