postingslister
Postingslister, in information retrieval and computer science, are the data structures that store, for each term, the list of documents in which the term occurs. In many systems, a postingslister is part of an inverted index, which maps terms to their postings lists. A postingslister typically records, alongside a document identifier, metadata such as term frequency and the positions where the term appears within the document. The positions enable supporting advanced queries such as phrase searches and proximity queries, where the relative locations of terms matter.
The data in postingslister can be compressed to save space, using techniques such as delta encoding of
During query processing, the search system retrieves the postings lists for the query terms and computes unions
In common usage, postingslister corresponds to the English term “postings list” or “positional index.” It is