Techniques allow a computer to responsively search for graph shapes similar to a user-selected graph shape much faster. Data can be pre-processed and stored as vectors, along with an index. The index can be used to find similar vectors that represent graph shapes similar to a user-selected shape in a computationally efficient manner. Vectors of multiple resolutions can be used to anticipate different sizes of a graph that a user can select, and comparisons can be repeated and refined. When a satisfactorily small number of candidate vectors are determined, more computationally intensive distance calculations can be performed on data reconstructed from the vectors.