SQL Query sort by closest match - tsql

Question

We have a Locations search page that is giving us a challenge I've never run across before.
In our database, we have a list of cities, states, etc. with the corresponding geocodes. All was working fun until now...
We have two locations in a city named "Black River Falls, WI" and we've recently opened one in "River Falls, WI".
So our table has records as follows:
Location City State
-------------------------------------
1 Black River Falls WI
2 Black River Falls WI
3 River Falls WI
Obviously our query uses a "LIKE" clause to match city, but when a customer searches the text "River Falls", in the search results, the first results shown are always "Black River Falls".
In our application, we always use the first match, and use it as the default. (We could change it, but it would be a lot of un-budgeted work)
I know I could simple change the sort order to have "River Falls" come up first, but that's a sloppy solution that works only in this one case.
What I'm wondering is if there is a way, through T-SQL (SQL Server 2008r2) to sort by "best match" where "River Falls" would "win" if we search for "River Falls, WI" and "Black River Falls" would work if we search for "Black River Falls" WI.

Answer 1

You can use the "DIFFERENCE" function to search using the closest SOUNDEX match.
Select * From Locations WHERE City=#City ORDER BY Difference(City, #City) DESC
From the MSDN Documentation:
The integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values
that are the same. The return value ranges from 0 through 4: 0
indicates weak or no similarity, and 4 indicates strong similarity or
the same values.
DIFFERENCE and SOUNDEX are collation sensitive.

Answer 2

Like this:
;WITH cte As
(
SELECT *
, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY LEN(City)-LEN(#UserText)) As MatchPrio
FROM Cities
WHERE City LIKE '%'+#UserText+'%'
)
SELECT *
FROM cte
WHERE MatchPrio = 1
Update:
You can change the ORDER BY expression above to also use DIFFERENCE(..) or any other combination of criteria.