I'm working on a small search engine in a Perl environment where I can't use databases, it has to be flat files.

The search engine structure I've come up with involves an index with a word,documentnumber,documentnumber structure on every line, like so:

alpha,0,1,2
bravo,2,3,4
charlie,3,4,5
(etc)

where the word "alpha" is in documents 0,1 and 2, the word "bravo" is in documents 2,3 and 4 and so on.

So the structure as it stands requires me to open a 500kb file with hundreds of words/lines in it, and process every line to see if it starts with the search term(s).

So it occured to me yesterday that it might actually be easier to have a structure where I actually had hundreds of files, where the keyword was the filename and the content was the list of documents, so rather than (pseudocode): 

open(large file)
for each line of the file {
put it into an array
see if item 0 of the array matches the search term
grab the document list if it does
}

[download]
I could just do something like: 
if(a file exists called "/www/search/$searchterm"){
open it and grab the document list
}

[download]
so am I crazy or what?

I guess the factors are:

It's obviously a very messy solution, in that I'd have a folder stuffed with a large number of very small files, but in terms of doing less file-reading, less I/O, are there any gains?

In reply to Poor Person's Database by Cody Pendant

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