Apropos of...

Checking - there’s nothing faster than a binary search is there unless you are also worried about insert time which means back trees right? Ie a slow indexing process that creates a simple ordered list for fast binary search is the most efficient for reads, but not inserts (as you have to re-sort the file each time)?

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you could use a radix trie if you're always operating off the prefix, which does bring things back into binary search, or you could opt for a hypergraph embedding of shared segments such that progressing from a root marker you have a radix, or omitting the root you just do a hypergraph search

An inverted index of stemmed/lemmatized words so I can't use the integer key patterns of a forward index - although I could use prefix patterns now you've reminded me!

Technically there's faster algorithms, but it's only in use case specific conditions. What are you trying to do?