Described herein is a technology for facilitating searching and matching of data. In some implementations, an input data string, including one or more ideographic elements, is received and converted to a Latin-based input data string. One or more input keys may be generated based on the Latin-based input data string. A reference database may be searched for one or more candidate records indexed by at least one of the one or more input keys. If the one or more candidate records are found, a match score is determined for the one or more candidate records.