Searching for people is one of the most difficult problems for search engines.
“Surnames cause the biggest problems in genealogy… In one document, my ancestor’s surname appeared as Mury, Murry and Murray. Samuel’s surname is Murry on his headstone. On the stone of his son Levi, it’s Murray.”
The most widely used standard for searching for name variants is Soundex, however this does not take account of non Anglo-Saxon sounding names and does not work with a thesaurus of known variants.
NameX, which was developed for use on Originsearch was designed specifically for looking at the name variants used historically, as well as phonetic variants. For example, it picks up 56 variants of Mury. It would be interesting to take the Namex concept further and allow you to choose name variants based on the ethnicity or language of the search.