Lucene Index and Query Design Question - Searching People

Question

I have recently just started working with Lucene (specifically, Lucene.Net) and have successfully created several indicies and have no problem with any of them. Previously having worked with Endeca, I find that Lucene is lightweight, powerful, and has a much lower learning curve (due mostly to a concise API).

However, I have one specific index/query situation which I am having problems wrapping my head around. What I have is a person directory. People can be searched for in this application, with the goal of returning both exact and approximate matches. Right now, in the index I concatenate the "FirstName" and "LastName" into a single field called "FullName", adding a space between the two. So FirstName:Jon with LastName:Smith yield FullName:Jon Smith. I do anticipate the possibility of middle names and possibly suffix, but that is not important at the moment.

I would like to do the equivalent of a fuzzy search on the name, so someone searching for "John Smith" would still get back "Jon Smith". I had thought about a multisearch, however, this becomes more involved if his name was actually "Jon Del Carmen" or "Jon Paul Del Carmen". I have nothing in what the user types in to delineate the first name or last name pieces.

The only thought that I have is that I could replace spaces in the concatenated value with a character that would not be discarded. If I did this when I built the document for the index and also when I parsed the query, I could treat it as one larger word, right? Is there another way to do this that would work for both simple names ("Jon Smith") and also more complex names ("Jon Paul Del Carmen")?

Any advice would truly be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Edit: Additional detail follows.

In Luke, I put in the following query:

FullName:jonn smith~

It is being parsed as:

FullName:jonn CreatedOn:smith~0.5

With an Explanation of:

BooleanQuery:boost=1.0000
    clauses=2, maxClauses=1024
    Clause 0: SHOULD
        TermQuery:boost=1.0000
            Term: field='FullName' text='jonn'
    Cluase 1: SHOULD
        FuzzyQuery: boost=1.0000
            prefixLen=0, minSimilarity=0.5000
            org.apache.lucene.search.FuzzyTermEnum: diff=-1.0000
            FilteredTermEnum: Exception null

"CreatedOn" is another Field in the index. I tried putting quotes around the term "jonn smith", but it then treats it like a phrasequery, instead. I am sure that the problem is that I am just not doing something right, but being so green at all of this, I am not sure what that something truly is.

Answer 1

My problem was with how I was building the index. What I ended up doing was making sure that it was not tokenizing the FullName, and the query started returning the correct results. The Explain results from above were due to an ID10T error on my part and is now returning correctly.