Unit 5: How Programs Run - Making Things Fast

In the last unit you built a search index that could respond to queries by going through each entry one at a time. The search index checked to see if the keyword matched the word you were looking for and then responding with a result.

However, with a large index and lots of queries, this method will be too slow. A typical search engine should respond in under a second and often much faster.

In this unit you will learn how to make your search index much faster.