Full-Text search: truncation operator and relevance ranking?

[drobs]

Greetings,

We would like to begin supporting the truncation operator on our website's search engine--however, we still require the results to be sorted by relevance. If a client enters "televis*" into the search engine, and we perform the search in boolean mode, pages containing "television", "televise", "televised", etc will be returned. However, because it is a boolean mode search, all rows will have a relevancy value of 1.

A user-provided "workaround" on the MySQL site said to use the same keywords but NOT in boolean mode to get a usable relevance ranking. However, a standard fulltext search for "televis" or "televis*" will return no rows.

Anyone have any experience with a similar problem, and could provide some insight into getting a trustworthy relevance ranking?

Thanks in advance.

 

[TonyGroves]

You could try the following approach:
1. Do a boolean-mode search.
2. From the result set, get your program to pick out the matching words.
3. Do a non-boolean-mode search for the words which have been selected.

Just a thought.