[sword-devel] Re: [bt-devel] fast search

[sword-devel@crosswire.org]

Trevor Jenkins wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, David Kahn <dkahn@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> > Trevor Jenkins wrote:
> > >
> > > On Sun, 4 Feb 2001, David Kahn <dkahn@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> > >
...
> > > With the availability of books (commentaries etc) the size is not fixed.
> > > Signature approaches such as rushmore suffer this problem.
> >
> > Yes, but the size of one given book or commentary would never change
> > once the book is finished.
> 
> You're forgetting personal notes. These are expected to grow. After years
> of use I'd expect to be able to search my notes with the same speed I
> search the Bible text or someone else's notes ... uh book.

I know that QuickVerse (and probably others) get around this by making the
"notes" a separate file; hence, the book really doesn't change sizes.

I think that's good.  That approach allows you to put the book on CDROM and
not use up extra disk space for read-only data.  Also, unless the book is
quite small, I'd expect the book to dwarf the notes, therefore, searching
notes (or even re-org'ing the notes file from time to time) wouldn't take
long.  After all, even bad algorithms run well/fast when the data is small
enough. :-)

Kevin