Indexerar

Indexerar is a Swedish verb meaning to create or construct an index, typically to improve the speed and efficiency of locating information. In information technology, indexering involves organizing data so that queries can be answered quickly, rather than scanning every item in a collection.

Common applications include library catalogs, databases, search engines, and content management systems. In these contexts, indexing enables fast retrieval of documents, records, or metadata based on keywords, attributes, or other search terms.

A central concept in full-text indexing is the inverted index. It maps each term to the documents in which it occurs and often stores positional information to support phrase and proximity queries. Other indexing approaches include the forward index, which stores documents and their terms, and various structures tailored to specific databases, such as B-tree or hash indexes.

Indexing typically involves several steps: text normalization (case folding, tokenization), optional stop-word removal, stemming or lemmatization, and the creation of the index data structures. Any indexing system may also store statistics such as term frequency and document frequency to improve ranking and relevance.

Maintenance is an important consideration. Indexing can be incremental, updating the index as new data arrives, or require periodic reindexing to reflect large-scale changes. Trade-offs exist between faster read queries, storage requirements, and update latency.

Overall, indexering is a foundational technique in information retrieval and data management, enabling efficient search, filtering, and access across large datasets.