C# Finding relevant document snippets for search result display

Question

In developing search for a site I am building, I decided to go the cheap and quick way and use Microsoft Sql Server\'s Full Text Search engine instead of something more robust l

Answer 1

Well, here's the hacked together version I made using the algorithm I described above. I don't think it is all that great. It uses three (count em, three!) loops an array and two lists. But, well, it is better than nothing. I also hardcoded the maximum length instead of turning it into a parameter.

private static string FindRelevantSnippets(string infoText, string[] searchTerms)
    {
        List termLocations = new List();
        foreach (string term in searchTerms)
        {
            int termStart = infoText.IndexOf(term);
            while (termStart > 0)
            {
                termLocations.Add(termStart);
                termStart = infoText.IndexOf(term, termStart + 1);
            }
        }

        if (termLocations.Count == 0)
        {
            if (infoText.Length > 250)
                return infoText.Substring(0, 250);
            else
                return infoText;
        }

        termLocations.Sort();

        List termDistances = new List();
        for (int i = 0; i < termLocations.Count; i++)
        {
            if (i == 0)
            {
                termDistances.Add(0);
                continue;
            }
            termDistances.Add(termLocations[i] - termLocations[i - 1]);
        }

        int smallestSum = int.MaxValue;
        int smallestSumIndex = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < termDistances.Count; i++)
        {
            int sum = termDistances.Skip(i).Take(5).Sum();
            if (sum < smallestSum)
            {
                smallestSum = sum;
                smallestSumIndex = i;
            }
        }
        int start = Math.Max(termLocations[smallestSumIndex] - 128, 0);
        int len = Math.Min(smallestSum, infoText.Length - start);
        len = Math.Min(len, 250);
        return infoText.Substring(start, len);
    }

Some improvements I could think of would be to return multiple "snippets" with a shorter length that add up to the longer length -- this way multiple parts of the document can be sampled.