Levenshtein functions installed and seem to be doing what they should, looks like this will work, thanks again. To anyone that ends up following after, phpMyAdmin doesn’t seem to play nice with stored functions. Here’s exactly what I did on the command line to make this work right (max string size is adjusted to 400 characters). 
mysql> delimiter //
mysql> CREATE FUNCTION LEVENSHTEIN (s1 VARCHAR(400), s2 VARCHAR(400))
-> RETURNS INT
-> DETERMINISTIC
-> BEGIN
-> DECLARE s1_len, s2_len, i, j, c, c_temp, cost INT;
-> DECLARE s1_char CHAR;
-> DECLARE cv0, cv1 VARBINARY(256);
-> SET s1_len = CHAR_LENGTH(s1), s2_len = CHAR_LENGTH(s2), cv1 = 0x00, j = 1, i = 1, c = 0;
-> IF s1 = s2 THEN
-> RETURN 0;
-> ELSEIF s1_len = 0 THEN
-> RETURN s2_len;
-> ELSEIF s2_len = 0 THEN
-> RETURN s1_len;
-> ELSE
-> WHILE j <= s2_len DO
-> SET cv1 = CONCAT(cv1, UNHEX(HEX(j))), j = j + 1;
-> END WHILE;
-> WHILE i <= s1_len DO
-> SET s1_char = SUBSTRING(s1, i, 1), c = i, cv0 = UNHEX(HEX(i)), j = 1;
-> WHILE j <= s2_len DO
-> SET c = c + 1;
-> IF s1_char = SUBSTRING(s2, j, 1) THEN SET cost = 0; ELSE SET cost = 1; END IF;
-> SET c_temp = CONV(HEX(SUBSTRING(cv1, j, 1)), 16, 10) + cost;
-> IF c > c_temp THEN SET c = c_temp; END IF;
-> SET c_temp = CONV(HEX(SUBSTRING(cv1, j+1, 1)), 16, 10) + 1;
-> IF c > c_temp THEN SET c = c_temp; END IF;
-> SET cv0 = CONCAT(cv0, UNHEX(HEX(c))), j = j + 1;
-> END WHILE;
-> SET cv1 = cv0, i = i + 1;
-> END WHILE;
-> END IF;
-> RETURN c;
-> END//
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)
mysql> CREATE FUNCTION LEVENSHTEIN_RATIO (s1 VARCHAR(400), s2 VARCHAR(400))
-> RETURNS INT
-> DETERMINISTIC
-> BEGIN
-> DECLARE s1_len, s2_len, max_len INT;
-> SET s1_len = LENGTH(s1), s2_len = LENGTH(s2);
-> IF s1_len > s2_len THEN SET max_len = s1_len; ELSE SET max_len = s2_len; END IF;
-> RETURN ROUND((1 - LEVENSHTEIN(s1, s2) / max_len) * 100);
-> END//
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> delimiter ;