SEARCH DEVICE

A search device includes: a similar word candidate acquirer including a word dictionary searcher to perform a comparison between an input character string and word character string data, and search for word character string data similar to the input character string to acquire, as similar word candidates, the word character string data, and a number-of-similar-word-candidates controller to select similar word candidates from the similar word candidates according to a preset threshold; a similar word selector to calculate an edit distance between each of the similar word candidates selected and the input character string, and select, as a similar word, a similar word candidate whose edit distance is equal to or less than a predetermined distance; and a name searcher to refer to a name search index data storage to search for a search text including the similar word selected by the similar word selector.