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Message-ID: <45F6EDC8.10703@aksis.uib.no>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:30:32 +0100
From: Oystein Reigem <oystein.reigem@aksis.uib.no>
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Subject: Wildcard searches with * or ? as the first character
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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,

- �ystein -

-- 
�ystein 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: <oystein.reigem@aksis.uib.no>. Home tel: +47 56 14 06 11. Mobile: +47 97 16 96 64. Home e-mail: <oreigem@broadpark.no>. Aksis home page: <www.aksis.uib.no>.


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