A couple of years back, I collected a list of 814 real search terms. Of those, 13% of the searches had a misspelling or typo in them. Unfortunately, our catalog usually returns no results when a word is misspelled, even if it's an obvious typo.
In order to help our users retrieve better results for their searches, we have been looking at a number of different ways to provide a spell check option. Most of the products I found didn't pass my initial "harry poter" search test. However, a couple of months ago, I found an article talking about a Unicorn ILS library using a service called Lucien from Jaunter. I tried out one of the libraries using it and was very pleased with the results. As a bonus, this service is also significantly cheaper than many of the other options.
For the past several months I have been working with Jaunter to try and incorporate "did you mean" suggestions into our new test catalog. We're the first Horizon ILS library to try using their service. At this point, we have it working for the basic search page. Jaunter is still trying to get it to work for the Advanced Search option but given how our catalog is designed, that may not be possible.
I tested the Lucien suggestions using the misspelled words I had previously compiled. It offered correct suggestions about 83% of the time. Here are some of examples I tried:
- eclips
- haibane renmai
- the wedding planers daughter
- spiderwick chronicals field guide
- ennvy
- rurouni kenshi
- jujistsu
- english liturature
- mistang horse
- malaryia
At this point, I believe this feature is ready for staff testing. Go to our test catalog and let me know what you think of the spelling suggestions.
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