Any Fuzzy Software ( Other than SOUNDEX / NYSIIS )?

Hi All

We are using soundex (and later tried Nysiis) for fuzzy name search
software. But we faced a lot of problems the search accuracy was not very
good also we saw a lot of misses of relevant names.

There are many problems other than precision and accuracy, with soundex and
NYSIIS.

e.g.

Look for Smith and it will come-up with around 250 very popular last names.
That dones not help much when a user is searching for "John Smith". Also, it
does not return Creighton for Kryton as the search string.

I googled a little and saw soming called NamiX. Without contacting the
company ( arizcon.com ) directly, I wanted to get feedback from newsgroups
or people who are experts at this. Has anyone used this software? If so, Is
it as good as they claim?

Thanks a million in advance.

Steve Creighton
(please remove .antispam from email address) or post back your answers to
this groupSteve,

This is not really the group for this kind of question but Name match
software or simply text matching software can be reasonably cheap or very
expensive. The best I've used (~$100K price tag for prod software only) was
Ascentials Quality Stage Server. Just so I related this to SQL Server after
all what group is this posted in?

A company I consulted for had a need to match names address pairs to members
in thier SQL DB. They already owned and used Quality Server for other
purposes. They eventually decided to write an extensive TSQL stored
procedure that checked for about 20 different combinations of things like
soundex of last name plus state plus first three letters of street address.
The client was statisfied with the match rate and they could understand it
well. The moral of the story here is if absolute highest accurate match
rate is essential then use a package writen by someone with a PHD in
statistics. If over 99% is all your looking for, write it in something you
can support and maintain.

Ray

"Evaluating Fuzzy SW" <evalsofty@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:Ze6Ed.8827$c13.2366@.bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
> Hi All
>
> We are using soundex (and later tried Nysiis) for fuzzy name search
> software. But we faced a lot of problems the search accuracy was not very
> good also we saw a lot of misses of relevant names.
> There are many problems other than precision and accuracy, with soundex
> and
> NYSIIS.
> e.g.
> Look for Smith and it will come-up with around 250 very popular last
> names.
> That dones not help much when a user is searching for "John Smith". Also,
> it
> does not return Creighton for Kryton as the search string.
> I googled a little and saw soming called NamiX. Without contacting the
> company ( arizcon.com ) directly, I wanted to get feedback from newsgroups
> or people who are experts at this. Has anyone used this software? If so,
> Is
> it as good as they claim?
> Thanks a million in advance.
> Steve Creighton
> (please remove .antispam from email address) or post back your answers to
> this group