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US006278992B1
(12) United States Patent ao) Patent No.: us 6,278,992 Bi
Curtis et al. (45) Date of Patent: Aug. 21,2001
(54) SEARCH ENGINE USING INDEXING
METHOD FOR STORING AND RETRIEVING
DATA
(76) Inventors: John Andrew Curtis, 6001
Killbury-Huber Rd., Plain City, OH
(US) 43064; Gordon Frank Scherer,
1190 S. Sunbury Rd., Westerville, OH
(US) 43081
( * ) Notice: Subject to any disclaimer, the term of this patent is extended or adjusted under 35 U.S.C. 154(b) by 0 days.
(21) Appl. No.: 09/251,882
(22) Filed: Feb. 17, 1999
Related U.S. Application Data
(63) Continuation-in-part of application No. 08/937,990, filed on Sep. 26, 1997, now abandoned, which is a continuation of application No. 08/904,405, filed on Jul. 31, 1997, now abandoned.
(60) Provisional application No. 60/041,403, filed on Mar. 19, 1997.
(51) Int. CI. G06F 17/30
(52) U.S. CI 707/3; 707/2; 707/100;
707/103; 707/500; 707/513
(58) Field of Search 707/3, 103, 10,
707/2, 100, 500, 513
A Search Engine utilizing a method and system for efficient storage and retrieval of data. The system comprises a record file, an index file, a duplicate segment file and access to a network of computers. The index files contains locations of data items, pointers to other index files, or an empty designation. The index files are arrays that contain locations corresponding to a predetermined range of characters with which the data items may be formed. Data items are stored according to the character strings of each data item. The first portion of a data object is indexed according to the indexing method of the present invention while a second portion of the data object is indexed according to another known database technology, such as B-tree.
46 Claims, 38 Drawing Sheets
