Fuzzy search technique

I have been talking to a contractor about adding a fuzzy (approximate)
search facility to my home-made website.

He has his own solution which is based around just considering all possible
alternative words with the same consonant pattern as the words in my search
terms and has also suggested using either:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html

or

http://sphinxsearch.com/

Can anyone share their preferred approaches to adding search facilities to
websites? I am talking about searching a database, for example, search
artist / title / description.

I am working in C and would have preferred a C solution but that is not
essential. There must be some ready made solutions out there ideal for this
purpose?

Web search is essentially a spell-check application. Each search term is
spell checked to provide a short list of possible alternative spellings of
those words, not based on a generic dictionary but on a dictionary formed
from the words in the database.

Once a full set of alternative spellings is found for all the search terms
we select all relevant items from the database using indexing on those
words.

Many thanks for any thoughts / recommendations.

David

What kind of database? Some databases have searching capabilities built-in.

Sorry... I am using MySQL.
David

Searching and retrieving a stemmer reduces the query to its word root form and matches results containing this stem. For example for query 'specially' a stemming algorithm will find the results "especially", "special", "specialize", "specializing", "specification" and other having the root "spec". However if in the query word will be casual mismatch like 'spesial' or 'spetial' the search engine based on a stemming algorithm will show zero results.

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