MySQL Reference Manual - 4.0.20

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13.6.2 Full-Text Searches with Query Expansion

As of MySQL 4.1.1, full-text search supports query expansion (in particular, its variant "blind query expansion"). This is generally useful when a search phrase is too short, which often means that the user is relying on implied knowledge that the full-text search engine usually lacks. For example, a user searching for "database" may really mean that "MySQL", "Oracle", "DB2", and "RDBMS" all are phrases that should match "databases" and should be returned, too. This is implied knowledge.

Blind query expansion (also known as automatic relevance feedback) is enabled by adding WITH QUERY EXPANSION following the search phrase. It works by performing the search twice, where the search phrase for the second search is the original search phrase concatenated with the few top found documents from the first search. Thus, if one of these documents contains the word "databases" and the word "MySQL", the second search will find the documents that contain the word "MySQL" even if they do not contain the word "database". The following example shows this difference:

mysql> SELECT * FROM articles
    -> WHERE MATCH (title,body) AGAINST ('database');
+----+-------------------+------------------------------------------+
| id | title             | body                                     |
+----+-------------------+------------------------------------------+
|  5 | MySQL vs. YourSQL | In the following database comparison ... |
|  1 | MySQL Tutorial    | DBMS stands for DataBase ...             |
+----+-------------------+------------------------------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM articles
    -> WHERE MATCH (title,body)
    -> AGAINST ('database' WITH QUERY EXPANSION);
+----+-------------------+------------------------------------------+
| id | title             | body                                     |
+----+-------------------+------------------------------------------+
|  1 | MySQL Tutorial    | DBMS stands for DataBase ...             |
|  5 | MySQL vs. YourSQL | In the following database comparison ... |
|  3 | Optimizing MySQL  | In this tutorial we will show ...        |
+----+-------------------+------------------------------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Another example could be searching for books by Georges Simenon about Maigret, when a user is not sure how to spell "Maigret". A search for "Megre and the reluctant witnesses" will find only "Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses" without query expansion. A search with query expansion will find all books with the word "Maigret" on the second pass.

Note: Because blind query expansion tends to increase noise significantly by returning non-relevant documents, it's only meaningful to use when a search phrase is rather short.