Ideas for creating a “Did you mean XYZ” feature into website

Question

I\'d like to give users the ability to search through a large list of businesses, but still find near matches.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how best to go

Answer 1

This is probably a crazy solution but could you split the business name by space and then search either all the items or maybe the first couple.

So you might search on 'ABC' and 'Business' but leave out 'Name' as this might take too long.

You might even check to see if the string is of a certain length, then trim and just search on the first say 5 letters.

Have you had a look at "soundex" as a way of searching through your businesses. Again, I think you'd need to split the name by space.