[amelius]

Okay, now I understand what you meant.

But what if a search needs to be fast regardless of whether the string has been searched for before?

[justin66]

I thought the thing peff briefly described above sounded pretty good. The worst case complexity, if I'm visualizing it right, would be the length of the string you were comparing.

I remember some discussion of this in previous HN threads but I don't know what it was about...