One of the best ways to enhance the search experience is by offering spelling corrections. This is sometimes presented at the top of search results with such text as "Did you mean ...". Solr supports this with the SpellCheckComponent
.
Note
A related technique is to use fuzzy queries using the tilde syntax. However, fuzzy queries don't tell you what alternative spellings were used; the case is similar for phonetic matching.
For spelling corrections to work, Solr must clearly have a corpus of words (a dictionary) to suggest alternatives to those in the user's query. "Dictionary" is meant loosely as a collection of words, and not their definitions. Typically, you configure an appropriately indexed field as the dictionary or instead, you supply a plain text file. Solr can be configured to use one or more of the following spellcheckers: