How to correct the user input (Kind of google “did you mean?”)

Question

I have the following requirement: -

I have many (say 1 million) values (names). The user will type a search string.

I don\'t expect the user to spell the names c

Answer 1

This is an old problem, DWIM (Do What I Mean), famously implemented on the Xerox Alto by Warren Teitelman. If your problem is based on pronunciation, here is a survey paper that might help:

J. Zobel and P. Dart, "Phonetic String Matching: Lessons from Information Retieval," Proc. 19th Annual Inter. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'96), Aug. 1996, pp. 166-172.

I'm told by my friends who work in information retrieval that Soundex as described by Knuth is now considered very outdated.