[Tutor] A problem: scanning for keywords in a bunch of text?

[Daniel Coughlin]

This is just a thought, and I might be entirely off base, but can you process 
the the strings prior to searching through them? If so then you should be able 
to create some kind of numerical index on each chunk of searchable data and that 
could make your 
scanning go faster. I have thought about this for about 20 minutes so it might 
not make too much sense or be very clear.

It is inspired by the anagram algorithm in Programming Perls (Which i am so happy you encouraged us to read!). 
  
If you could process each 
searchable text (it looks like you might be seaching through abstracts?) into 
a list of numbers, you could then search that list of numbers. And it would 
be faster then searching the whole text. 

As I said this is quick thought. Hope it at least adds to the thinking.

It also looks a little less complicated than the suffix trees ;-)

Daniel