Forty Years Of Text Indexing

This paper reviews the first 40 years in the life of textual inverted indexes, their many incarnations, and their applications. The paper is non-technical and assumes some familiarity with the structures and constructions discussed. It is not meant to be exhaustive. It is meant to be a tribute to a ubiquitous tool of string matching - the suffix tree and its variants - and one of the most persistent subjects of study in the theory of algorithms.