It sounds like you're just trying to do similarity search? In which case, I imagine the key terms you want to be looking for are Information Retrieval and Recom

It sounds like you're just trying to do similarity search? In which case, I imagine the key terms you want to be looking for are Information Retrieval and Recommendation Algorithms The most basic thing I'd imagine (assuming text docs) is something like index each document by TF-IDF, and then the new document by TF-IDF, and then rank results by similarity You're basically doing a google search on documents, but with a really big query (another document)