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

The Soundex algorithm may help you out with this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

You could pre-generate the soundex values for each name and store it in the database, then index that to avoid having to scan the table.