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We are building a searchmachine with elasticsearch to use intern in our company. We are using one inputfield where users can give in their searchwords (Google like). So it should be possible to search on different kind of words separate by spaces.

Because it is possible to search on names, and names can be written on different kind of ways, we would like to treat different characters as equal.

For example the name "Heymans" can be written like "Hymans", "Heimans", "Hijmans", ...

If a user search on "Hijmans", "Heymans" should be found with, preferably, the same score when searching on "Heymans".

Is it possible to set "ei", "ij", "ey" as equal values? We know that there is the synonym feature, but if we do it that way, the scores are very low.

We do not want to set "Hymans", "Heimans", "Hijmans" as synoniems, because there are other names with the same problem...

Thanks for the help!

Rein Van Leirsberghe
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  • Do all these names usually have a very similar phonetic? If yes, you might want to try the [phonetic analyzer](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-analysis-phonetic) – Val Dec 23 '15 at 13:33
  • That sounds great! Unfortunately we are dealing with Dutch... I think the phonetic analyzer is more something for English... – Rein Van Leirsberghe Dec 23 '15 at 14:20
  • Well, the underlying algorithm have been developed by German folks. You might still want to check their documentation [here](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-analysis-phonetic/blob/master/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/index/analysis/phonetic/Nysiis.java), [here](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-analysis-phonetic/blob/master/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/index/analysis/phonetic/KoelnerPhonetik.java) and [here](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-analysis-phonetic/blob/master/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/index/analysis/phonetic/HaasePhonetik.java). – Val Dec 23 '15 at 14:24
  • And have you tried the [dutch analyzer](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-lang-analyzer.html#dutch-analyzer) also? – Val Dec 23 '15 at 14:25
  • Also here is another [SO question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20632042/elasticsearch-searching-for-human-names) which is similar to yours. – Val Dec 23 '15 at 14:28

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