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Yes, variations of the Shortest Word Distance problem are commonly asked in technical interviews, including FAANG-style interviews. They test a candidate's ability to optimize brute-force comparisons using efficient traversal and tracking techniques.
The optimal approach is a single-pass traversal of the word array. Track the most recent indices of the two target words and update the minimum distance whenever both indices are known.
No special data structure is required for the basic version of the problem. A simple array traversal with a few integer variables to track indices is enough to compute the minimum distance efficiently.
The optimal solution runs in O(n) time because the list of words is scanned only once. The space complexity is O(1) since only a few variables are used to store indices and the current minimum distance.