As computing technology has advanced, the tasks that computers have been expected to handle have increased in size and complexity. One such task is managing two or more very large sets of elements and responding to subsequent requests querying which of the sets a particular element is part of These elements can be any types of strings or integers, such as the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of all the Web pages on the Internet, which currently totals approximately five billion URLs. For example, a computer may be expected to keep track of the URLs of all the Web pages on the Internet as two or more separate sets of URLs, and subsequently respond to queries as to which of the sets includes a particular URL. Managing such large amounts of data can be problematic as determining which set a particular element is part of can be very time-consuming.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds