Why not start a new project at greatbridge.org?
I'd be happy to see metaphone() move in there, soundex() would make
sense. I have a hashing algorithm that grabs the first letter off of
words, except for user-definable 'stop words', which we use to look for
likely organization name matches.
These could all fall under a project of PG string functions.
I think, as little things in contrib/, it's easy for people to miss
these. With a project page, some discussion, etc. (& a place in contrib/),
more people would be able to use these.
PG functions are one of the things that separates PG from MySQL (which has
only C UDFs, and IIRC, not on some platforms) and InterBase (which has
plsql-like procedures, but functions can only be written in C). I think
our functions are one of our strongest cases, and the more we can show
people examples of how to use them, and the larger our useful library, the
more we win.
P.S. What exactly does contains() do?