Marian Steinbach — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:03:32 GMT

@Vivek: Thanks for the inspiration! I’d love to give that system a try. But I guess it needs a reasonable number of searches, failures and refined searches in order to come up with reliable patterns. Unfortunately I don’t have a suitable system at hand to try it out.

@Adrian: Soundex might be good for the English names, but remember that the problem described deals with people from 140 countries. Soundex isn’t reliable for a corpus with that many different pronounciation schemes.

What really made me think was the example with people who married and changed their names. Off course, if the person had their maiden name in some alias field and if that field was index as well, we’d be fine. But the real world is far from perfect – and the bigger the companies, the more difficult it gets to maintain central databases like that.

For me, the idea to observe users and create a benefit from their behaviour is what is actually important here, not just technical ways of how to match strings (from user intput) against strings (in a database/index). Again, thanks for that inspiration!

Marian

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Marian Steinbach