You'll likely want a search that is strongly sub-linear, ie better than O(n). There are string search algorithms that approach O(log(m)*n/m), on the average. With long needles (length m), that'll be a blast. However, you don't get anything for free: preprocessing requirements are O(m) in time and space.

Google for "Turbo Reverse Factor" and "Alpha Skip Search". Wikipedia seems to lack pages for these. With alpha skip, you create a trie (or a table) where you push the offsets of all substrings of length log(m). Bitstrings are just strings on size=2 alphabet. Which algorithm or variant thereof will prove most suitable for you is something hardly anyone here could guess.

In reply to Re: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing (long) bit-strings. by Anonymous Monk
in thread [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings. by BrowserUk

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