Brian,
For this purpose I have used Lucene to index the data and allow the fuzzy searching. Lucene allows for fuzzy searches for example search for roam~ will return roam, foam, roams etc. This however takes quite some work to setup and integrate and can't be directly integrated into the standard search fields. We used it to display in screens and in the index.html (custom build widget & Mendix+Java work).
Hope this gives you an idea.