thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Data & Analytics · Intermediate

Inverted Index

A mapping from each term to the list of documents or rows that contain it, used by search engines and full-text indexes.

Definition

Inverted indexes power Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Lucene and database full-text search. They make keyword lookup fast and support relevance scoring such as BM25.

Example

The term 'refund' maps to document IDs [12, 87, 301].

Exam tip

An inverted index is what search engines use; do not confuse it with a reverse-key index.

Related terms