Best way to effect part word searching by default

Question

I want to use the standard site search but much prefer that (first) part word search is in place by default. By this I mean if a user searches for dog they will also find dogs, so the term Craft uses would then be dog*.

My strategy would then be to take the search string (e.g. 'dog fee') and remove any commas or fullstops unless the string is in quotes ("dog fee"). I would then split the string using spaces and throw away any empty strings ('dog', 'fee'), and then append the * to each word and send 'dog* fee*' to the search system.

Is this the best approach to get what I want, or have I missed a glaringly obvious and easy way of doing it?

Answer 1

This sounds like a good approach and could be done using a twig filter on your search string.

Here are the first two lines of the example from the docs:

{% set query = craft.request.getParam('q') %}
{% set entries = craft.entries.search(query|customFilter).order('score') %}

In this example query is now modified by customFilter and can be updated in your Twig filter to behave however you like.