20. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving, from a user, a portion of a personal name, the portion comprising three or more characters of a first name, a nickname, a middle name or a last name; converting the portion to a normalized portion by reducing the three or more characters to their simplest equivalents; permuting the normalized portion to identify one or more permutations thereof having a Damerau-Levenshtein distance of one; searching a main index to identify one or more first keys matching the normalized portion or the one or more permutations; searching a phonetic index to identify one or more second keys matching the normalized portion or the one or more permutations; compiling a first plurality of suggested matches, the first plurality of suggested matches comprising the union of indexed items corresponding to the one or more first keys and indexed items corresponding to the one or more second keys; and presenting, to the user, at least a portion of the first plurality of suggested matches.
20. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving, from a user, a portion of a personal name, the portion comprising three or more characters of a first name, a nickname, a middle name or a last name; converting the portion to a normalized portion by reducing the three or more characters to their simplest equivalents; permuting the normalized portion to identify one or more permutations thereof having a Damerau-Levenshtein distance of one; searching a main index to identify one or more first keys matching the normalized portion or the one or more permutations; searching a phonetic index to identify one or more second keys matching the normalized portion or the one or more permutations; compiling a first plurality of suggested matches, the first plurality of suggested matches comprising the union of indexed items corresponding to the one or more first keys and indexed items corresponding to the one or more second keys; and presenting, to the user, at least a portion of the first plurality of suggested matches. 21. The method of claim 20 , further comprising receiving, from the user, a second portion of the personal name, the second portion being adjacent to and received after the first portion, the second portion comprising one or more characters, the first and second portions collectively forming a string of characters.