What is the meaning of fuzzy search?
Fuzzy search is a search engine’s capability that gives relevant results even if the user types in wrong spellings into the search engine.
The fuzzy search comes by default packaged into expertrec’s custom search engine.
Here is an example of a search query for a spelling error “shool“. As you can see, the search engine brings upright results such as school.
How fuzzy search works?
Fuzzy search works based on mathematical formulas that calculate the similarity between two words.
One such calculation is called Levenshtein distance.
In layman’s terms, this measures the similarity or distance between two words.
Here is an illustration- The more the Levenshtein distance, the more dissimilar the two words are.
Taking two words- w1- school and w2-school, let’s calculate the Levenshtein distance (which turns out to be 1).
Now let’s calculate the Levenshtein distance between the words w1=shool and w3=scholar which turns out to be 4
The lesser the Levenshtein distance, the move higher in the search results a particular word match occurs. Hence, for the query shool, a school comes up higher in search results than a scholar.
