Hi, I've actually posted this message in de dev mailing list earlier, because I though my 'issue' is a limitation of the functionality of Lucene, but they redirected me to this mailinglist, so I hope one of you guys can help me out :)
Maybe the 'issue' I'm addressing now is discussed thouroughly already, in that case I think I need some redirection to the sources of those discussions :) Anyway, here's the thing. For all I know it's impossible to search partial words with Lucene (except the asterix method with e.g. the StandardAnalyzer -> ambul* to find ambulance). My problem with that method is that my index consists of quite a few terms. This means that if a user would search for 'ambu amster' (ambulance amsterdam), there will be so many terms to search, the waiting time is just inacceptable. Now I started thinking why it's impossible to search only a 'part' of a term or even only the 'start' of a term and the only reason I could think of was that the Index terms are stored tokenized (in that way you (of course) can't find partial terms, since the index doesn't actually contain the literal terms, but tokens instead). But Lucene can also store all terms untokenized, so in that case, in my humble opinion, a partial search would be possible, since all terms would be stored 'literally'. Maybe my thinking is wrong, I only have a black box view of Lucene, so I don't know much about indexing algorithm and all, but I just want to know if this could be done or else why not :) You see, the users of my index want to know why they can't search parts of the words they enter and I still can't give them a really good answer, except the 'it would result in too many OR operators in the query' statement :) . I've tried using a Dutch stemmer (most of the data I'm indexing is Dutch) but that didn't work out quite good. Furthermore users sometimes search for a certain 'filename' and mostly they just enter a part of the name and thus don't find anything. I hope someone can enlighten me :) Thanks in advance! Jori --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: java-user-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: java-user-h...@lucene.apache.org
