System Design · Senior · Question 54 of 75

What data structure makes full-text search fast?

✓Correct answer: An inverted index mapping each term to the documents containing it
2A B-tree on the whole text column
3A linked list of documents

Explanation

Search engines also store positions and statistics for ranking. LIKE '%term%' can't use a normal index efficiently.

Further reading

Wikipedia: Inverted index ↗

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