Well, GENi had some phonetic matching options - but they are no longer exist...
The best ones are in JRI ( http://www.jewishgen.org/Jri-pl/jriplweb.htm ) : Sounds like, Phonetically like, Starts with. I cannot imagine finding 10th of what I found there on my Polish branches without these great options. In the Sounds like they are using a special Sondex algorithms - it'll be great if GENi could just negotiate getting any (if at all) license to use them (for at least Jewish names there are amazing matches like Jake/Jacob/Jankel/Yaakov/Yankel ).
Since almost always there will be spelling and name variants when different people add profiles (e.g. Minkowski, Minkowsky, Minkovski, Minkovsky...), this kind of matching is critical feature in any genealogy software ! At list start for the advanced search, than a killer app would be to add also to the automatic matching !...
Thanks
Ofer