{"id":1711,"date":"2008-01-11T22:51:34","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T02:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1711"},"modified":"2008-01-12T00:32:46","modified_gmt":"2008-01-12T04:32:46","slug":"soundex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1711","title":{"rendered":"SoundEx"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span> couple of days ago, it was the 70th birthday of Donald Knuth<\/a> (or rather, his webpage<\/a>), who as you found out, is hero to many programmers around. I think he’s still working on completing his masterwork, ‘The Art Of Programming’<\/a>. Anyway, his birthday has not gone unnoticed in the blogosphere<\/a>. It’s almost like everybody knows each other. No, really. Really.\n<\/p>\n

That brings me up to something (slightly) related: I was using DailyMotion<\/a> to find older clips of the 80’s band Blondie and the search result of that site always seem to include references to movies with blondes; some of them quite, lets say, exquisite. I won’t link to a URL of such, but I encourage you try it out. Obviously, DailyMotion is using a ‘soundex’ routine<\/a>: this is an algorithm that indexes keywords by sound based on (language-specific) rules. This works brilliantly for looking up people’s last names (or even first names) but not for searching specific terms like the example I mentioned earlier.<\/p>\n

Seriously:If I’m searching for ‘Blondie’, I’m expecting results for Blondie and not ‘Blond’, ‘Blonde’, ‘Blondes’, ‘Bland’, ‘Britney Spears’. And definitely not ‘2 h0t bl0nd3s k1ss1ng 3ach 0ther’1<\/sup>.\n<\/p>\n

\n

1<\/sup> Obviously, I used ‘some encryption’ there to ensure that your kids don’t end up on this kids-safe website when they google for ‘Blondie’. You’re welcome.\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, it was the 70th birthday of Donald Knuth (or rather, his webpage), who as you found out, is hero to many programmers around. I think he’s still working on completing his masterwork, ‘The Art Of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[176],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}