Martijn Tonies wrote:

>
>> Historically, database guys don't "get" search. You're never going to
>> get any where trying to convince them you have a better way to handle
>> the index (I don't think you do) until you convince them that there is a
>> difference between full context word search and "containing". Good luck.
>>
>
> Ji,
>
> how would you handle partial word searching with <table, field, record,
> word position>?
>
> eg: a search for "and" could/should return "Gandalf"
>
>

That's not a reasonable thing to ask for (try it with Google, for
example). It is reasonable to ask for a root word search ("manch*" for
Manchester), that is easy to do.

Taking your example further, "and" will almost always be a "stop" word
ignored my searches. Falcon searches for "jim and ann" by finding
candidates "jim * ann" then checking each for an "and" in the index with
the correct word position.

Finally, things like depluralizing make sense to do in a preprocessing
step rather than in the index.