Phonetic search

[Wildcat Media]

Given the rampant poor spelling I witness daily across the Internet, a good addition to ES might be to add the Phonetic Analysis plugin for Elasticsearch, and make it configurable through the XenForo administrator panel.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/5.0/analysis-phonetic-token-filter.html
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/5.0/analysis-smartcn.html

The install script for the ES add-on might need to detect whether or not the plugin is installed.

Results could display as something like, "Did you mean..." with matches below.

 

[dutchbb]

There is an add-on for it (with some extra nice functions), but standard in xf would be nice.

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/elasticsearch-essentials.4801/

 

[Wildcat Media]

I have this add-on, but it does not do phonetic searching. ElasticSearch needs the plugin (linked above) installed on the server before it can perform phonetic searches, and the add-on cannot make use of something that is not there. There are a handful of settings that also need to be made to the plugin (which could be accomplished through XenForo's admin panel), such as choosing which type of phonetic search to perform (metaphone, soundex, etc.). Naturally if any of the parameters are changed, the ES index would need to be rebuilt. (No worries here, since rebuilds usually are quite fast even for more than 15 million posts.)

I admit our search now is better than it ever was back in the old vBulletin days, yet members still complain about how awful the search it. (I disagree with that, but you know how hateful some members can be.) Members who struggle with searches thanks to poor spelling would be assisted greatly by this.

I think ElasticSearch can even save a list of synonyms somehow, but that would be a separate suggestion here.