Simple search alternatives for Ruby

I'm looking for a simple way to generate 'Did you mean ...' style search tips when a search over the title of a record doesn't hit开发者_如何学JAVA on a substring match because of slightly different punctuation or phrasing for a Rails 3 app.

Most commonly, I want to generate hits for 'Alpha: Beta' when the user searches for 'Alpha Beta', 'Alpha & Beta' for 'Alpha and Beta' and 'Alpha Beta' for 'The Alpha Beta' e.g.. The same goes for the opposite direction for the first two examples, because my current substring searching will catch the latter case already. I would prefer to do this without specific logic for each of the above examples though, as there may be other variants I can't think of right now.

I'd also prefer to shy away from a solution that requires me to popular a hidden field of the record with alternate spellings as records are generated, which is then searched over instead of the publicly displayed one.

I'm guessing that a proper full text search like Sphinx/Thinking Sphinx would accomplish this, but I want to check if there's an easier solution for my limited scope problem. Ideally something that automatically generated this hidden field by striping out common words like 'the', 'and' and punctuation like '&' and ':' from both the record title and search term and the title field and then does the search. The actual order of the remaining words needn't necessarily have to match when juggle around ('Alpha Beta Gamma' can match 'Alpha, Beta, Gamma' but not 'Alpha, Gamma, Beta').

This solution doesn't meet all of your requirements, but I believe it's close enough to be worth mentioning - the excellent "scoped_search" gem, available at https://github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search

It implements a simple query language where a search for 'alpha beta' matches results containing all those words, rather than the exact phrase - see the wiki at https://github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search/wiki/query-language for more information on what it supports.

It generates SQL queries behind the scenes, so doesn't require a separate search daemon like Sphinx.

However, I don't believe it does anything similar to stripping out common words. Perhaps you could get some mileage by manually stripping out your common words, and then getting scoped_search to search for your revised term?