searching list of tens or few hundreds short text strings, sorting by relevance

Question

I have a list of people that I'd like to search through. I need to know 'how much' each item matches the string it is being tested against.

The list is rather small, currently 100+ names, and it probably won't reach 1000 anytime soon.
Therefore I assumed it would be OK to keep the whole list in memory and do the searching using something Java offers out-of-the-box or using some tiny library that just implements one or two testing algorithms. (In other words without bringing-in any complicated/overkill solution that stores indexes or relies on a database.)

What would be your choice in such case please?

EDIT: Seems like Levenshtein has closest to what I need from what has been adviced. Only that gets easily fooled when the search query is "John" and the names in list are significantly longer.

Answer 1

If you are looking for a 'how much' match, you should use Soundex. Here is a Java implementation of this algorithm.

Answer 2

Check out Double Metaphone, an improved soundex from 1990.

http://commons.apache.org/codec/userguide.html

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/commons/proper/codec/trunk/src/java/org/apache/commons/codec/language/DoubleMetaphone.java?view=markup

Answer 3

You should look at various string comparison algorithms and see which one suits your data best. Options are Jaro-Winkler, Smith-Waterman etc. Look up SimMetrics - a F/OSS library that offers a very comprehensive set of string comparison algorithms.