Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

A certain ePub reader on MacOS used to use a bloom filter for text search. You would decompose an ePub into pages of text and generate a bit array for the text on each page. As the user types in the search field you could often reject large portions of the document — leaving perhaps only a handful of pages where the code would only then have to drop down to the more tedious string matching algorithm.

Very cool.



Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: