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What type of search is this called? And how do they implement efficient searching of substring in this manner? Notice how when one type "empeee" it matches "Emp loy ee Vi e w.xib"

Xcode

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TextMate

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WrightsCS
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Tony
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1 Answers1

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The name is "fuzzy matching" or "fuzzy search" or some variant. Wikipedia has an article about that.

romainl
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  • I see. What kind of technology powers this kind of fuzzy search behind the scenes though? Is it Apple's searchkit or apache lucene or some other custom-made solution? – Tony Dec 11 '11 at 17:44
  • No idea, I don't do Objective C and your two examples are proprietary apps so I can't really look at the source. I don't think they use Lucene, it wouldn't seem "right" to me, and I don't know the specifics of searchkit but one could use the Levenshtein algorithm for that. I've used it in the past in PHP and it was very effective. – romainl Dec 11 '11 at 20:49