Academic Search and Relevance: basic normalization for matching

One more post about Academic Search and Relevance. This time around is back to the basics: there is little you can do for relevance if you do not match the article first. In order to do so, you need to assume that users will make mistakes while they write. So you need to be proactive and correct those mistakes on their behalf. Let's see a few examples

Here the mistake is made on purpose for simulating a user with a different keyboard. The search should automatically support normalization, which does not. ScienceDirect does.

Here the idea is to search a specific item related to prostate cancer and named {ARN-509}, By mistake, it is written as {ARN \space -509} and no match is given.

ScienceDirect simply match it regardless of the mistake.

while Google matches only with the exact term. In this case, they are not able to correct the user's mistake automatically