Current, I’ve got a stored procedure that has a main goal of doing a full text search through a database table of films and tv shows. In order to get it to do partial-keyword searching, I added some code in SQL to split up the search query by spaces, and output a statement like the following:
'batman*' ~ 'be*'
The original string, ‘batman be’, for instance, could be generated from a textbox on the page as the user is typing and on each javascript keyup event, I send whatever is in that textbox to the stored proc for results to get results as I type (like autocomplete). In this case, the user may have been looking for ‘Batman Begins’, or ‘The Batman: Batgirl Begins’ (a TV show episode) and they both should show up as a result.
Below is a sample of my query. @partialKeywordString is, in the example above, 'batman*' ~ 'be*'.
SELECT f.title FROM Films f INNER JOIN CONTAINSTABLE(Films, Title, @partialKeywordString) f_key ON f.filmid = f_key.[key] ORDER BY f_key.Rank DESC The problem I have with the query is that the ranking doesn’t seem to be exactly what I’d expect. If I were to just search for ‘batman’, one would believe that all movie titles, beginning with, or only containing the word ‘batman’ would appear first. But they don’t.
A sample result of what happens when one searches for just ‘batman’ is below:
‘Batman: The animated series – Episode 114’
‘Adventures of Batman and Robin – Episode 218’
‘Batman and Robin – Episode 101’
‘The Batman – Episode 101’
‘Batman and Robin – Episode 204’
Much further down the list is the movie I was searching for–‘Batman Begins’ or even just ‘Batman’.
I’m looking for advice on how to tweak this query–I’m definitely not a SQL expert, and I feel like I just man-handled the above code to get it to work. I have a feeling there’s a more elegant or powerful solution, and I just haven’t found it yet.
Thank you in advance
After some more researching, I’m going to try and use Lucene.Net for my movie-title search engine, and not rely on Full-Text Searching in SQL Server 2005. Early testing shows that the results have been better and more relevant with Lucene. A search for ‘batman’ returns the following partial result-set: