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Real-Life Applications of Tries

Explore real-world applications of trie data structures including auto-complete, autocorrect, browser history tracking, approximate string matching, and DNA sequence analysis. Understand how tries efficiently handle these tasks and improve performance in various software and scientific domains.

Let's learn about real-life applications of tries through examples.

Auto-complete

A widespread application of the trie is auto-complete or type-ahead suggestions. For example, once a user types an alphabet, the list of potential word queries is significantly reduced, allowing the program to evaluate possible query strings quickly. In a real-world search engine, in addition to words, a variety of other information is typically stored for query strings.

Auto-complete search suggestions
Auto-complete search suggestions

Only words can be stored in a dictionary or a state machine, ...