General alignment definitely is quite different, however The vast majority of sequence data that's produced these days are short reads. Read-mapping is a much lower-bar and more similar to string search than proper sequence alignment. The BWT-based search [1] is a bit more practical with the small alphabet size of DNA compared to most human texts, however.
Comments
Sequence alignment and string search are different enough problems that we really should distinguish between them.
General alignment definitely is quite different, however The vast majority of sequence data that's produced these days are short reads. Read-mapping is a much lower-bar and more similar to string search than proper sequence alignment. The BWT-based search [1] is a bit more practical with the small alphabet size of DNA compared to most human texts, however.
http://people.unipmn.it/manzini/papers/focs00draft.pdf