There's a searching concept known as edit (levenshtein) distance that is close but not exactly what you're talking about. To rephrase your question: is there a datastructure that can pre-compute the levenshtein distance for a set or results?
Yes, and it's crazy complicated. See Levenshtein Automata[1]. In reality, I would let the professionals handle this by either using Open/ElasticSearch or Apache Lucene.
Yes, and it's crazy complicated. See Levenshtein Automata[1]. In reality, I would let the professionals handle this by either using Open/ElasticSearch or Apache Lucene.
[1]http://blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Levensht...