in reply to Hash Search Ranking

For your first two cases the solution is straight forward, but you need to do a bit more to cover the third. Here is one way, maybe not so efficient but something to build on. I am assuming your focus is on the artists - i.e. you want to rank each artist as opposed to ranking each line.
use Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1; my %artists = ( 'William Blake' => 1, 'David Hockney' => 1, 'Francis Blake' => 1, 'David Lynch' => 1, ); my @lines = ( 'William Blake', 'Blake Morrison', 'david lynch', 'francis bacon', 'William Blake and Blake Morrison', ); my %rank; # make artists lower-case for case-insensitive match my %artists_lc = map { lc($_) => $_ } keys %artists; # map all the artist words my %artist_words; for my $artist ( keys %artists ) { my @words = split( /\s+/, $artist ); for my $word ( @words ) { $artist_words{lc($word)}{$artist}++; } } # have a look at the map print Dumper(\%artist_words); for my $i ( 0 .. $#lines ) { my $line = $lines[$i]; my $artist; my @words = split( /\s+/, lc($line) ); for my $word ( @words ) { if ( my $hash = $artist_words{$word} ) { $rank{$_}{$i}++ for keys %$hash; } } # deal with exact and case-insensitive if ( $artists{$line} ) { $rank{$line}{$i} = 256; } elsif ( $artist = $artists_lc{lc($line)} ) { $rank{$artist}{$i} = 128; } } print Dumper(\%rank);
Output:
{ Artist => { line_index => score } { 'David Hockney' => { '2' => 1 }, 'David Lynch' => { '2' => 128 }, 'Francis Blake' => { '0' => 1, '1' => 1, '3' => 1, '4' => 2 }, 'William Blake' => { '0' => 256, '1' => 1, '4' => 3 } };