J
John Williamson
We have produced an Access DB application to record visitors to a charity.
Many of the visitors (mostly foreign born) have long names comprised of four
or more individual names; e.g., Aaaaa Bbbbb Ccccc Ddddd. The names were
entered originally by North Americans with little clue as to the preferred
order of the names, so they migh appear in some other order and with
abbreviations, such as: Cccc Dddd Aaaaa B. The legacy data source separated
names into FName LName, but confusion reigns over which constitutes a LName,
so we concatenated them into a single Name field to facilitate searching.
Even so, we find ourselves searching for each individual name, one at a
time, and then scanning the resulting list for the best match with the other
names. I would like to include in our application a 'Google'-like search
capability in which our users can enter several names in a text box, and see
a resulting list of person records in the order in which they best match the
terms. So, four names could be entered in any order, and the search result
would list records that matched all four names first, then those which
matched three of four, then two of four, and then only one. We can handle
parsing the text string into individual search arguments (variables), but we
are looking for some existing models for processing the individual searchs
and the comparing results to sort the best matches. Guess this sounds like
a rudimentary search engine. Appreciate any direction someone could
provide. Best regards, John
Many of the visitors (mostly foreign born) have long names comprised of four
or more individual names; e.g., Aaaaa Bbbbb Ccccc Ddddd. The names were
entered originally by North Americans with little clue as to the preferred
order of the names, so they migh appear in some other order and with
abbreviations, such as: Cccc Dddd Aaaaa B. The legacy data source separated
names into FName LName, but confusion reigns over which constitutes a LName,
so we concatenated them into a single Name field to facilitate searching.
Even so, we find ourselves searching for each individual name, one at a
time, and then scanning the resulting list for the best match with the other
names. I would like to include in our application a 'Google'-like search
capability in which our users can enter several names in a text box, and see
a resulting list of person records in the order in which they best match the
terms. So, four names could be entered in any order, and the search result
would list records that matched all four names first, then those which
matched three of four, then two of four, and then only one. We can handle
parsing the text string into individual search arguments (variables), but we
are looking for some existing models for processing the individual searchs
and the comparing results to sort the best matches. Guess this sounds like
a rudimentary search engine. Appreciate any direction someone could
provide. Best regards, John