davidgt0@yahoo.com wrote:   
   > Hi everyone,   
   >   
   > I was wondering if anyone heard of a search algorithm that has the   
   > search time almost constant regardless of the volume of data searched.   
   >   
   > Does anyone know which is the fastest search algorithm that performs   
   > well for very large volumes of data?   
   >   
   > Thanks a lot.   
   > David   
   >   
      
   If you are searching structured data, or a structured index or   
   unstructured data, you can use the middle guess method.  Check the   
   middle for the value and if it is not that take the middle of the half   
   where the value must be.  You can see that this operation can double   
   the search space with one added operation.   
      
   Though with modern indexing engines search is generally almost never a   
   real problem, look at Google, you just need to do the computation in   
   crawling the data set.  This is where the expense is, especially with   
   unstructured data sets.   
      
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