Funny I've also came up with exactly the same way of doing it around 2008. It was in France for the Yellow Pages (PagesJaunes) and initially we used soundex bu

Funny I've also came up with exactly the same way of doing it around 2008. It was in France for the Yellow Pages (PagesJaunes) and initially we used soundex but it was too English centric. We ended up using the Double Metaphone [1] which works better for other European languages. Our database (Oracle) didn't come with any extension to do that so we'd programmatically populate a column at the time the table was loaded, then indexed it. We also weren't quite searching for family names but for city names and street names, so there was a fair bit of pre-processing applied to identify the list of most likely words to be useful for the match. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone#Double_Metaphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone#Double_Metaphone