Core search, use wildcards by default

Question

I've been trying to Google my way out of this one but I can't seem to find a solid solution for using wildcards by default for the core search module. Only things I can find are patches which aren't really looking like totally stable. And I want my customer's multi-lingual production site to be as stable as possible.

So, the current situation is as follows:

1. When I search for foo I will get only foo as result.
2. When I search for foo* I will be getting foo and foobar as result.

What I want is:

When I search for foo I will get foo and foobar, regardless of language.

Is there any way to elegantly solve this. I'm prepared to solve this with a custom module for example.

Answer 1

I've always used the Porter Stemmer module to handle that, it works a treat.

This module implements the Porter stemming algorithm to improve English-language searching with the Drupal built-in Search module.

The process of stemming reduces each word in the search index to its basic root or stem (e.g. 'blogging' to 'blog') so that variations on a word ('blogs', 'blogger', 'blogging', 'blog') are considered equivalent when searching. This generally results in more relevant search results.