Some years ago I remember the frustratioln of searching for infomation on Delaunay triangulations on the web. The problem was that very few people seemed to be able to spell "delaunay" - all sorts of phonetic variants emerged, such as "delawny", "delory" and even "dellorny". This problem still exists, despite the ubiquity of spelling checkers.

So, how about a Wikipedia:Soundex search mode in %SEARCH? It would have to be linked to word search, I suspect.

Of course Soundex is pretty old hat now; maybe someone can suggest a better algorithm.

This would be a neat little student project.

-- Contributors: CrawfordCurrie - 01 Jun 2007

Discussion

It is great for finding names, especially foreign sounding names.

-- ArthurClemens - 01 Jun 2007

Whatever soundex algorithm you use ... the missing bit for this undertaking is to maintain indexes, i.e. word indexes storing their soundex-code and their occurrence. The word index would ease a couple of other things as well that are recomputed everytime right now: backreferences, keyword search, etc.

-- MichaelDaum - 02 Jun 2007