Fuzzy-Search

Gerald Carlton and I will be presenting on fuzzy name search at DjangoCon US 2026 on Monday, August 24, and this is the companion blog post. Searching for a person by name is harder than it looks: names might be typed differently by different operators or change over a person’s lifetime; for example, Smith could be entered as Smyth, Smythe, or Smidt, and Weiss as Weiß. Although names are particularly susceptible to misspelling, these strategies apply to all fuzzy string matching.