Using Spelling Suggestions

By Yusuf Mohsinally,
Sr. QA Engineer

Your users have probably misspelled a search query on more than one occassion. It shouldn't matter.

For example, an employee at a semiconductor company who types in "heaflouroethane" into an intranet search box should be asked if he meant to search for "hexafluoroethane."

Similarly, a user in the company's American manufacturing facility who searches for the same compound's "vapor pressure" should be asked if she also wanted to search for the term "vapour pressure", which is found in documents written at the company's R&D lab in the United Kingdom.

There's little doubt that spelling suggestions can be enormously helpful to users on your public website or intranet.

Ultraseek's spelling suggestions use dynamic context-sensitive algorithms that are based on documents that have been indexed. This means users receive alternate spellings that occur within the document base, which helps if a particular word has been misspelled within the documents themselves.

But, to avoid flooding a user with unhelpful suggestions, the suggested term must appear in at least three indexed documents.

If you would like to suggest known alternate terms that may be related to the user's search, you can use the thesaurus feature. For example, you may want to suggest the search term "Ultraseek" when a user searches for "Verity".

Or, use the QuickLinks feature to provide a link to the "best known" document for a particular search term.

Activating/Deactivating Spelling Suggestions

To activate (active by default) the spelling suggestion feature for a particular user interface style, select the "Show Spelling Suggestions" checkbox found under the Interface > Query tab in the admin interface.

Using Spelling Suggestions

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