Advanced
System Design
Q89 / 100
In a large-scale search system, what is the purpose of an "inverted index", and why is it central to search performance?
Correct! Well done.
Incorrect.
The correct answer is A) An inverted index maps terms/words to the documents (and positions) where they appear, allowing fast lookups of which documents contain a given term instead of scanning every document
A
Correct Answer
An inverted index maps terms/words to the documents (and positions) where they appear, allowing fast lookups of which documents contain a given term instead of scanning every document
Explanation
Search engines build inverted indexes so that a query for a term can directly retrieve the list of matching documents (postings list), avoiding a full scan of all documents — foundational to systems like Elasticsearch.
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89/100