String searching problem

Given a TEXT string say "abcmanmfaxyzabcn" and a search string "man". Find the number of occurrences of the SEARCH string "man" in the given text string. The alphabets of the search string can be separated by other characters in between them in the text string e.g. "man" occurs twice in "mabcayzn" with 'a' occurring at two different positions.

Solution:

1. First build a boolean array of 26 chars and store the chars which occur in the SEARCH string.
2. Next remove all characters from the TEXT string which don't occur in the SEARCH string using the above array. This allows us to reduce the problem size by removing unwanted characters from TEXT string.
3. The first approach i gave to the interviewer was to use a recursive function, which passes 2 arguments to the function findSubstring(String text, String search) and this searches search[0] in all the places in text and then calls the function on the remaining subproblem. However the time complexity of this solution is exponential.
4. Next i came up with a dynamic programming solution. In this we create a matrix res[m][n] with TEXT string chars as the columns and the SEARCH string chars as the rows. Now we calculate  res[i][j] as:

res[i][j] =   0  if SEARCH[i] != TEXT[j]

                          Sum of all res[i-1][k] for all  0<k<j

The time complexity of this solution is O(mn) and is a lot faster than the recursive solution.