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PORails Searching (Full text vs Semantic) for Food Products
 

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  1. PORails Searching (Full text vs Semantic) for Food Products
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    <p>I'm trying to build a search interface for a grocery store in Rails. I have several grocery store products stored in my database, but I'm struggling to find a good way to search through them.</p> <p>So far, I've used <a href="http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/" rel="nofollow">Thinking Sphinx</a> to do full text searching of the products. This works well for some items, such as 'eggs', but has several problems for other searches, such as 'lime'.</p> <p>For example, when I search for 'lime', I get the following returned items:</p> <ul> <li>Diet Sierra Mist Lemon Lime Fridge Mate Soda</li> <li>G2 Lemon Lime Low Calorie Electrolyte Beverage</li> <li>Deer Park Berry Lime Sparkling Water</li> <li>Ocean Spray Cocktail With Lime Cranberry Juice</li> <li>Vintage Seltzer Water Limn Lime</li> <li>Coke Diet With Lime Soda Contour Bottle</li> <li>Coke Diet With Lime Soda Fridge Pack</li> <li>Diet Sierra Mist Lemon Lime Fridge Mate Soda</li> <li>Refreshe Soda Diet Lemon Lime Fridge Pack</li> <li>Refreshe Soda Lemon Lime</li> <li>Refreshe Soda Lemon Lime Fridge Pack</li> <li>Sierra Mist Natural Lemon Lime Soda</li> <li>... etc</li> </ul> <p>All I really wanted was the actual fruit, which are listed as these products in my database:</p> <ul> <li>Limes Large</li> <li>Organic Limes</li> <li>Limes Key Prepacked</li> </ul> <p>How can I make my search more intelligent?</p> <p>It's worth noting that I do have a lot of categorical data on each product. I essentially have an entire "food tree", where each product is a root node of the tree.</p> <p>For the product 'Limes Large', for example, I have the following categories: </p> <p>Fruits &amp; Vegetables > Fresh Fruit > Citrus > Limes Large</p> <p>How can I better use these categories to improve my search?</p> <p>In my research, I am starting to believe I need to use semantic searching instead of full text searching. I came across the <a href="http://florianhanke.com/picky/index.html" rel="nofollow">Picky gem</a> for Ruby, which looks promising, but I'm not sure if I have the right approach. </p> <p>Can semantic searching help me perform a better search? Is Picky a good fit for data categorized in this way? Any other insights? Any guidance would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance.</p>
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