What's the best way to search Wikidata for items whose name or alias matches a string?  The search available via pywikibot seems to only find a match if the search string is a prefix of an item's name or alias, so searching for "Bush" does not return any of the the George Bush items.  I don't want to use a SPARQL query with a regex, since I expect that to be slow.

The search box on the Wikidata pages is closer to what I want.  Is there a good way to call this via an API?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to specify a language and also a set of types, but I can do that once I've identified candidates based on a simple match with a query string.