Elastic Search - implement "Did you Mean"

Question

We are trying to use Elastic Search in a Rails app and would like any input/code example on the implementation of "did you mean" feature. Essentially, we want to provide the end user an option to search for an alternate query like in google.

Answer 1

As of version 0.90.0.Beta1, ElasticSearch has a "term suggest" feature included, which is what you are looking for:

http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/api/search/term-suggest/

E.g. get from this query: "devloping distibutd saerch engies" this result: "developing distributed search engines"

Answer 2

Elasticsearch doesn't have it yet, it is opened as issue here basically it is waiting for the next Lucene release.

I achieved a similar "did you mean" behaviour using the phonetic analyzers, which worked for my use case, location names, that is not gonna work for all use cases....

a example mapping:- https://gist.github.com/1171014

so you can query using the REST api like this (mispelled london):-

{
  "query": {
    "field": {
      "nameSounds": "lundon"
    }
  }
}