String Similarity and Edit Distance
How Levenshtein distance powers spell checkers, search, and fuzzy matching.
Edit distance measures how many single-character changes (insertions, deletions, substitutions) are needed to transform one string into another. Lower distance means higher similarity.
Real-world uses
- Spell checkers suggest closest dictionary words
- Search engines handle typos with fuzzy matching
- Record deduplication in databases
- DNA sequence alignment in bioinformatics