Percent LIKE - Matching

How do you come up with percentages for how close of a match a certain result is to a query that contains a LIKE in the WHERE statement?

And if that's easy enough, how do I order them in the best match order?

OH, and I'm using MS SQL Server and PHP although as long as someone can give me the SQL theory, I can figure out the rest.

There was a similar question a while ago, which I gave an answer to. It might be close to what you want:

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...hreadid=199956

Thanks... I'll look into that.

Also look into soundex. There's plenty of free code and different ways to employ it;
and at it's core it is essentially a "give me the nearest match" methodology.