Indexing

Indexing is the process of organizing data to make it easily searchable, much like creating a detailed table of contents or a catalog for a large library. Instead of scanning through every word in a document when a search is performed, an index allows a system to quickly locate relevant information by mapping words or phrases to their locations in the dataset. The index acts as a lookup table that connects search terms to the documents or records where they appear, significantly speeding up retrieval times.

In multilingual and internationalized systems, indexing becomes more complex, as it must account for the unique characteristics of different languages and scripts. This includes handling tokenization for languages without spaces, applying language-specific stemming rules, managing alternate spellings, and linking related content across languages.

In this section, we’ll explore these challenges in detail, offering practical solutions and examples to help you build efficient indices that enable powerful and accurate search capabilities for diverse audiences. You’ll learn how to handle language-specific tokenization, stemming, and stop words, as well as how to build indices that accommodate alternate spellings, transliterations, and hierarchical relationships. Practical examples and configurations will demonstrate how to create robust indices that form the foundation of a successful search experience across languages and locales.