Needle in a Haystack: A Nifty Large-Scale Text Search Algorithm Tutorial

When coming across the term "text search", one usually thinks of a large body of text, which is indexed in a way that makes it possible to quickly look up one or more search terms when they are entered by a user. This is a classic problem for computer scientists, to which many solutions exist. What if what's available for indexing beforehand is a group of search phrases, and only at runtime is a large body of text presented for searching? These questions are what this trie data structure tutorial seeks to address. A real world application for this scenario is matching a number of medical theses against a list of medical conditions and finding out which theses discuss which conditions.