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lucenefuzzy-search

Fuzzy search complexity in lucene


I am using lucene 4.10.4.

Can anyone explain me how fuzzy search works? How much search time increases when compared to normal search?


Solution

  • Starting from Lucene 4, fuzzy search was implemented more efficiently, by usage of Fast string correction with Levenshtein automata paper

    To make a very long story short this paper shows how to recognize the set of all words V in an index where the Levenshtein distance between V and the query does not exceed a distance d, which is exactly what one wants with Fuzzy Search.

    Of course it still will be slower, than just straight lookup, that you will do for a concrete term, however it's not a performance killer anymore.