Hi folks
I have a section in my networking site where people can write things about themselves, such as likes dislikes, hobbies etc for their profile.
I am looking to provide a very basic profile matching service, and have done a bit of searching to find out what the best way to approach this feature is. I have looked at using the sql LIKE clause, but since the profile information can be any length, there seem to be too many variables to account for. I have also looked at identifying keywords in profile blurbs to do the matching too, but I am struggling to see how this could be done with relative ease.
My reason for posting this is simply to get some experienced knowledge about where to start the problem, of even some resources to look at that I may not have found yet.
If anyone could give me some advice on where to start i would be very grateful
I am develping in vb, with an sql server 2005 back-end
Hello my friend,
You are right about the SQL LIKE clause not being so useful when dealing with large amounts of text. I have worked on something similar before. The best thing to do is to have as many closed questions as possible regarding the profiles. And when they want to be more specific, add sub categories, and sub sub categories and so on. Then the SQL is easy. Most of the big guys do this. If you ever try and create a new hotmail account for example, they throw loads of checkboxes at you and throw the appropriate adverts at you every so often.
Kind regards
Scotty
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Hi Scotty
Thanks for the advice. I'm going to begin the development of this feature very soon so i will document what i have come up with here.
