Lightweight fuzzy search library

Question

Can you suggest some light weight fuzzy text search library?

What I want to do is to allow users to find correct data for search terms with typos.

I could use full-text search engines like Lucene, but I think it's an overkill.

Edit:
To make question more clear here is a main scenario for that library:
I have a large list of strings. I want to be able to search in this list (something like MSVS' intellisense) but it should be possible to filter this list by string which is not present in it but close enough to some string which is in the list.
Example:

• Red
• Green
• Blue

When I type 'Gren' or 'Geen' in a text box, I want to see 'Green' in the result set.

Main language for indexed data will be English.

I think that Lucene is to heavy for that task.

Update:

I found one product matching my requirements. It's ShuffleText.
Do you know any alternatives?

Answer 1

Lucene is very scalable—which means its good for little applications too. You can create an index in memory very quickly if that's all you need.

For fuzzy searching, you really need to decide what algorithm you'd like to use. With information retrieval, I use an n-gram technique with Lucene successfully. But that's a special indexing technique, not a "library" in itself.

Without knowing more about your application, it won't be easy to recommend a suitable library. How much data are you searching? What format is the data? How often is the data updated?

Answer 2

You didn't specify your development platform, but if its PHP then suggest you look at the ZEND Lucene lubrary :

http://ifacethoughts.net/2008/02/07/zend-brings-lucene-to-php/ http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.search.lucene.html

As it LAMP its far lighter than Lucene on Java, and can easily be extended for other filetypes, provided you can find a conversion library or cmd line converter - there are lots of OSS solutions around to do this.