MySQL: What is a reverse version of LIKE?

Question

LIKE operator in MySql is used to find rows that contain our query text, for example:

select name from user where name like \"%john%\"

Answer 1

This is a text indexing problem. If I get it right, your task is to find all references to people in a free-form text, and has nothing to do with LIKE or NOT LIKE.

In a general form, the database table against which you're looking for references acts as a dictionary to some text-indexing algorithm. Build an index on input string using this dictionary and hopefully you will get some matches.