Beginner's Guide

SMART SEARCH
Smart Search is a new feature in Joomla 2.5.
It adds a "smarter" search engine to the Joomla core which is more flexible and faster with auto-
completion and the "did you mean" feature (stemming).
Stemming?
A stemmer for English, for example, should identify the string "cats" (and possibly "catlike",
"catty" etc.) as based on the root "cat", and "stemmer", "stemming", "stemmed" as based on
"stem". A stemming algorithm reduces the words "fishing", "fished", "fish", and "fisher" to the
root word, "fish" (Wikipedia)
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.
The Joomla core package comes with an English stemmer and the so called Snowball Stemmer
(Extensions-> Smart Search -> Options). The English stemmer works out of the box, the Snowball stemmer
requires the Stem PHP extension and provides support for 14 languages including Danish, German,
English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian,
Russian, and Turkish.7
The data need to be indexed in order to get this flexibility and speed.
ACTIVATION
Smart Search is disabled by default. To enable it you have to enable the Content Plug-In Smart
Search and the five finder-Plug-Ins. The name finder comes from the roots of this component. It was a
3rd party component which was integrated into Joomla core (Figure 1).
Figure 1:Finder-Plug-in
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 172
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming