Name Search in Solr by Doug Turnbull.
From the post:
Searching names is a pretty common requirement for many applications. Searching by book authors, for example, is a pretty crucial component to a book store. And as it turns out names are actually a surprisingly hard thing to get perfect. Regardless, we can get something pretty good working in Solr, at least for the vast-majority of Anglicized representations.
We can start with the assumption that aside from all the diversity in human names, that a name in our Authors field is likely going to be a small handful of tokens in a single field. We’ll avoid breaking these names up by first, last, and middle names (if these are even appropriate in all cultural contexts). Let’s start by looking at some sample names in our “Authors” field:
Doug has a photo of library shelves in his post with the caption:
Remember the good ole days of “Alpha by Author”?
True but books listed their authors in various forms. Librarians were the ones who imposed a canonical representation on author names.
Doug goes through basic Solr techniques for matching author names when you don’t have the benefit of librarians.