Chapter SixteenExternal Searching

SEARCH ALGORITHMS THAT are appropriate for accessing items from huge files are of immense practical importance. Searching is the fundamental operation on huge data sets, and it certainly consumes a significant fraction of the resources used in many computing environments. With the advent of world wide networking, we have the ability to gather almost all the information that is possibly relevant to a task—our challenge is to be able to search through it efficiently. In this chapter, we discuss basic underlying mechanisms that can support efficient search in symbol tables that are as large as we can imagine.

Like those in Chapter 11, the algorithms that we consider in this chapter are relevant to numerous different ...

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