How to do user friendly text search?

Question

I need to implement text search in database.

I am looking for general methods to implement text search able to handle misspellings. I am also looking for general methods to fine tune search for a specific synthetic language.

Answer 1

Lucene is one library that implements many useful algorithms including fuzzy search and auto correction. Fancy languages are dealt with by stemming the original words - that is cutting off any variable prefixes/suffixes to replace all forms of one word with one expression. This can be useful even without full analysis of morphology e.g. cutting off last 's' in English.