Looking for fast fuzzy search algorithm

I have a list of approx. 10,000 titles. Periodically I get lists to be merged with my master list-but I need to compare them as the incoming lists sometimes have titles already in my master list. Right now I'm doing this in Excel but intend to generalize the search algorithm (if successful) and move the list to a database app, possibly using VB.Net for the programming. My problem is two-fold, speed & accuracy.

I could improve the speed by using Excel's Find but that makes the accuracy problem worse-using that I look for pretty much exact matches. (I believe the only options are case-insensitive & match partial cell contents.) I can write an algorithm that converts both lists to Soundex or similar code but to use that I need to process each entry in the incoming list against all the entries in the master list-that takes minutes at best, hours at worst. (I've got one incoming list that contains about 1000 titles. Most are smaller but breaking up the large list into smaller ones doesn't really reduce the running time, it just makes the job interruptible.)

I know that databases can perform fuzzy searches using pattern matching, can Excel? Or is this a task I should put off until I get all this into a database?

Thanks.