Well, it's not strictly Perl, but it may be usefull anyway. If you are using a file to store these titles over time and that file is in a format that you can use one of the DBI modules to search against, you could craft a SQL query to do near matches. SQL offers the LIKE select type, which I have used to get approximate information in the past. I have never used String::Approx, so I can't offer you a speed comparision, but using the SQL way was plenty fast enough to be used in a web search without noticed latency. http://w3.one.net/~jhoffman/sqltut.htm#Using_LIKE