Hacker News Reader

Well sure, but then you have to crawl though thousands of pieces of physical medium to load the file you want...

Do search indexes typically not include an identifier for a given resource? Seems to me that an index would be almost useless without them, as the match itself is more often than not far less useful than the document that contains it. Unless the information you need happens to be in the surrounding blurb.

So yeah, I'm not sure why you'd have to "crawl" through physical media when a search index ought to tell you right where your match is located. Is that not the entire point of indexing and searching?

An index maps a query to a specific item.

Say, a file reference within a storage hierarchy or record within a database.

(The concepts are fundamentally identical.)

Thank you for explaining :)

This, yes.