The discussion explores whether Discourse’s search engine can handle typos and multiple-word queries effectively. jserre asks if searches like ‘hohn’ or ‘john mx doelitle’ can find ‘John Max Dolittle’, referencing an older 2017 post on the topic. sam explains that AI-based search (like Algolia) can handle typos but is slower due to LLM-based term expansion, while standard search uses Snowball stemming, which catches some typos incidentally. JammyDodger clarifies that the Algolia plugin remains official and is available on Enterprise plans for hosted Discourse instances.
For instance, will DC search engine find “John Max Dolittle” with the following queries:
I was alerted by this post: Discourse search is awfully unsmart!
But it is quite old (2017). Have things improved since?
It seems that the Algolia plug in is no longer official?
AI based search is immune to typos, but it is not fast:
However the technique used means that it is a bit slower cause we need to expand the term using an LLM prior to looking for similarity.
General search stems using snowball: Snowball Stemmer - NLP - GeeksforGeeks
It catches some typos as a side effect, but really this is a side effect thing, we are not using metaphone or other sophisticated typo erasure techniques, there is nothing simple built into postgres for that.
Algolia plugin remains supported and official: Discourse Algolia Search
FWIW the Algolia search plugin is still official 
(If you’re hosted by us, it’s available on the Enterprise plans)
