Hi,
I have read that with Lucene it is not possible to do wildcard searches
with * or ? as the first character. Wildcard searches with * as the
first character (or both first and last character) are useful for text
in languages that have a lot of compound words, like German and the
Scandinavian languages.
Some systems do offer such searches, but at a penalty. I assume such
systems sometimes do a sequential search of the text, which is slow, and
sometimes a sequential search of an index, which might be a bit faster,
but still quite slow.
But a slow search might be better than no search, as long as the user is
aware of the consequences of doing wildcard searches starting with a
wildcard character.
Any comments?
Cheers,
- Øystein -
--
Øystein Reigem, The department of culture, language and information technology (Aksis), Allegt
27, N-5007 Bergen, Norway. Tel: +47 55 58 32 42. Fax: +47 55 58 94 70. E-mail: <[EMAIL
PROTECTED]>. Home tel: +47 56 14 06 11. Mobile: +47 97 16 96 64. Home e-mail: <[EMAIL
PROTECTED]>. Aksis home page: <www.aksis.uib.no>.
