Hash based optimization for faster access to inverted index

Inverted Index is an important data structure in computer science. It is used to create a mapping between a word and the set of documents in which that word appears. Thus, it is used to store documents per word. Currently, the output of inverted indexing is stored haphazardly in a look up table. Hence traversing through the look up table for fetching indexes requires linear search. The time complexity of linear search is O(n) where n is the number of words whose inverted index has been stored. In this paper, a hash based optimization is proposed for storing the output of inverted index which can reduce the searching time complexity to O(1). Since inverted indexes are quite popular in big data applications like search engines, a MapReduce implementation of the proposed technique is also presented which can be easily implemented in a distributed environment.