Best way to deal with misspellings in a MySQL fulltext search

The technical term for what you are looking for, is Levenshtein distance which is used to calculate the difference between two sequences (in this case a sequence of characters which is a string).

PHP actually has two built in function for that, the first being similar_text and the other called levenshtein which should help you out with your problem. You will have to benchmark if it is fast enough for your needs.

I think you should use SOUNDS LIKE or SOUNDEX()

As your data set is so small, one solution may be to create a new table to store the individual words or soundex values contained in each text field and use SOUNDS LIKE on that table.

e.g:

SELECT * FROM table where id IN 
(
    SELECT refid FROM tableofwords 
    WHERE column SOUNDS LIKE 'right' OR column SOUNDS LIKE 'shlder'
)

see: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html

I belive it is not possible to wild card seach the string :(

MySQL doesn't support SOUNDEX search in fulltext.

If you want to implemente a lucene like framework, it means that you have to take all the documents, splits them into words, and then builds an index for each word.

When someone search for "right shlder" you have to make a SOUNDEX search for each words in the worlds table:

    $search = 'right shlder';
preg_match_all('(\w+)', $search, $matches);
if (!empty($matches[0]))
   $sounds = array_map('soundex', $matches[0]);
$query = 'SELECT word FROM words_list
    WHERE SOUNDEX(word) IN(\''.join('\',\'',$sounds).'\')';

and then make a fulltext search:

$query2 = 'SELECT * FROM table
    WHERE MATCH(fultextcolumn)
    AGAINST ('.join (' OR ', $resuls).' IN BINARY MODE)';

Where $result is an array with the results of the first query.