Talk:Inverted index

Maybe the content of Full inverted index should be moved here? This page could also be expanded with some small examples for a full inverted index and an inverted file index, as seen in -- Nils Grimsmo 22:12, 18 November 2005 (UTC)


 * This has now been done. -- Nils Grimsmo 20:25, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Why is it called "Inverted"
I've been wondering, why is this data structure called an inverted index? After all, it's exactly like a regular index in a book, where you look up a word and find a list of pages that mention this word. It's not "inverted" in any sense from the normal definition of an index...

tries to explain that
 * The index is "inverted" in the sense that the key value is used to find the record rather than the other way round

but I don't understand this explanation, because this is how all indices work...

I could understand a different name: "inverted text". Whereas a text (treated as a bag of words) is defined by whether or not each word in the dictionary is in it, we can "invert" this information, and define for each word whether or not each file contains it. Instead of a file structure, we have an "inverted file" structure, which allows for quicker searching of words. Could it be that the phrase "inverted index" was coined by starting with the phrase "inverted-text index" and then dropping the word text? Or something of this sort?

Or is there a different explanation for the word "inverted" that appears in the name of the concept "inverted index"?

Nyh 14:04, 26 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I have never read anything about the naming, but I would guess that the phrase comes from the term "inverted files". As the concept of the term "file" narrowed over time, and the concept of such an index broadened, I guess some new term was needed, and "inverted index" was chosen because it was close to "inverted files". -- Nils Grimsmo 17:31, 26 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Consider the contents of the related article on search engine indexing, where I describe one reason for why it is called inverted. Josh Froelich 16:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Current state of the article
I think this article is rather unstructured and messy. It looks like to separate articles concatenated. A full rewrite would perhaps be nice? Klem fra Nils Grimsmo 20:55, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Agree, it looks more like an excerpt from a textbook. I was planning to propose a rewrite when time permits (which will be after the weekend). --airborne 20:46, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

inverted list/file database
This article should also mention, even before the webcrawling stuff, that the technique was used in some database management systems such as ADABAS, DATACOM/DB, and Infodata's Inquire. According to, many Relational database management systems use this structure for physically storing secondary keys.

I've gathered some more stuff:

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=inverted+list&i=45332,00.asp "inverted list" points to "inverted file", the def of which follows:

« ''In data management, a file that is indexed on many of the attributes of the data itself. For example, in an employee file, an index could be maintained for all secretaries, another for managers. It is faster to search the indexes than every record. Also known as "inverted lists," inverted file indexes use a lot of disk space; searching is fast, updating is slower.'' »

And:

Then:

(with references to:

--Jerome Potts (talk) 09:00, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Textbook cited without other change?
Why was ISBN 978-0262026512 added to the bibliography without any other edit or association to it within the article body? If it were a newly-cited work for the article, I would have expected an edit or piece of information in the article that was sourced from it. Otherwise, wouldn't simply be a "see also" type of reference? --Michael Mol (talk) 16:20, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

External link to exuberant ctags
I think this article should not have an external link to ctags. First, ctags's site does not provide any information relevant to this article, so WP:ELNO#1 applies. Second, there are several similar code indexing tools: etags, cscope, GNU Global, OpenGrok, LXR to name a few; it isn't clear to me why ctags is to be preferred here. -- X7q (talk) 23:42, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

Example
Why are we using an intersection instead of a union? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dappermuis (talk • contribs) 01:15, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

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