On 27 Nov 1998, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:
> The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> writes:
>
> > What do you mean by "fulltext searching"?
>
> He's talking about inverted text indices, where text is indexed such
> that a word is the key, and the index returns pointers to all the
> places where that word occurs. Knowledge of word structure is usually
> built in, so that "hacks", "hacker", "hackers", "hacking" and so on
> are known to be derivatives of "hack", and can match it if requested.
> Noise words such as "a", "the" and so forth are usually not indexed.
>
> Inverted indexed text storage tends to take up much space, but there
> are ways to reduce this, and the best implementations do it remarkably
> well. A simple example: it is not really necessary to actually store
> the original text; it can instead be a sequence of links to the store
> of all individual words in the text database.
>
> See http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/ for a powerful inverted indexing
> engine and various related software.
Just curious, but other then specialized applications like
Glimpse, does anyone actually support/do this?
Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org