For some reason today I wanted to look up Mikhail Baryshnikov. It's been a while so I forgot how to spell his last name. I didn't try very hard, and I got no enwiki result. Google, of course, found the correct spelling, which I then used on enwiki.
Since I used to do name searching and matching, this gave me an idea, which generalizes beyond just names.
For every article title (and maybe each redirect—we could look into that) we could generate a phonetic index[1] and store those in a special EalasticSearch index. (We could look at storing multiple phonetic indexes for better recall, possibly generated by multiple algorithms; some, like Double Metaphone, generate multiple index by themselves.)
Then, under certain circumstances (say, zero results and no suggestion from any other source, or no result with a score above a certain cutoff, or too few results, etc.), we could make a suggestion and/or show results based on matching phonetic index plus some score (say, a mix of page views and page rank, or whatever scoring we've got going on).
So, when some doofus (hey, that's me!) comes along and searches for "borishnakoff" (worse than what I actually searched for), we could correct to *baryshnikov* (there's page with that title) or give *Mikhail Baryshnikov* as a result (likely the top scoring item with the same phonetic index in the title), or something similar.
Other algorithms exist (and can be devised) for languages other than English, so the maximally fleshed out version of this would offer a choice of phonetic indexing algorithms, but I get ahead of myself.
*Has anyone looked into this kind of phonetic indexing for enwiki, Wikipedia in general, or other wikimedia projects before?*
I have some additional thoughts on how to test the effectiveness of phonetic indexing on zero results for enwiki without having to fully implement everything if the index sounds like something we could afford to build.
Thoughts?
—Trey
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_algorithm — Briefly, as an example, you drop non-initial vowels and duplicate letters, and collapse letters that tend to sound alike, while taking into account orthographic conventions like sh, ch, th, initial kn- or pt-, etc. So both *baryshnikov* and *borishnakoff* are likely to come out something like BRXNGV.
Trey Jones Software Engineer, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation