That's an interesting idea, I might try creating author fields with 
Soundex normalization rather than the standard English language 
'stemming' normalization.

Still curious to get more feedback on what others have done, even if you 
didn't consider it carefully, if you're doing it in production and it 
works good enough, it's a useful data point!

On 6/14/2011 8:31 AM, Erik Hatcher wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2011, at 08:10 , Keith Jenkins wrote:
>
>> Does Solr support Soundex?  (Soundex was originally developed to
>> assist with alternate spellings of names)
> Indeed.  And several other phonetic algorithms:
>
>     <http://wiki.apache.org/solr/AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters#solr.PhoneticFilterFactory>
>
> 	Erik
>