Building a Vector Similarity Detector: How One SQL Query Over 2.9M Charity Pairs Reveals the Gap Between Meaning and Spelling

Originally published on tamiz.pro. You feed two names into a matching engine and get a similarity score. Easy enough. But what happens when two strings look nothing alike yet mean the same thing — or look nearly identical but mean completely different things? This isn't a hypothetical. When we ran a vector similarity detector over a dataset of 2.9...