title: Better fuzzy matching performance?
body: <p>I'm currently using method get_close_matches method from <a href="http://docs.python.org/2/library/difflib.html" rel="noreferrer">difflib</a> to iterate through a list of 15,000 strings to get the closest match against another list of approx 15,000 strings:</p>
  
  <pre><code>a=['blah','pie','apple'...]
  b=['jimbo','zomg','pie'...]
  
  for value in a:
      difflib.get_close_matches(value,b,n=1,cutoff=.85)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It takes .58 seconds per value which means it will take 8,714 seconds or 145 minutes to finish the loop. Is there another library/method that might be faster or a way to improve the speed for this method? I've already tried converting both arrays to lower case, but it only resulted in a slight speed increase.</p>