[Haskell-cafe] Optimizing a title matcher

[Ketil Malde]

Lyle Kopnicky <lists at qseep.net> writes:

>> If you have some other metric other than prefix in mind for partial
>> matches, then things probably get a lot more complicated.  You're
>> probably looking at calculating minimum distances in some
>> feature-space, which calls for pretty sophisticated algorithms if
>> you need good performance.

> Yes, that's the kind of thing I'm looking at doing. Looking at edit
> distance.

Do you really need that to search for movie titles?  At any rate, an
exact-match finite-map implementation is a good start - to get good
performance, you probably will need to use some kind of index to
reduce the amount of data to search exhaustively (all-against-all).

For text searching I think it is effective to use an index that
maps from words (so that looking up a word gives you all the movies
with that word in the title). 

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants