Editing Incremental encoding (section)

== Applications ==

Incremental encoding is widely used in information retrieval to compress the lexicons used in [[Index (search engine)|search indexes]]; these list all the words found in all the documents and a pointer for each one to a list of locations. Typically, it compresses these indexes by about 40%.<ref>Ian H. Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell. Managing Gigabytes. Second edition. Academic Press. {{ISBN|1-55860-570-3}}. Section 4.1: Accessing the lexicon, subsection Front coding, pp.159&ndash;161.</ref>

As one example, incremental encoding is used as a starting point by the  [[GNU locate]] utility, in an index of filenames and directories. The [[GNU locate]] utility further uses [[bigram]] encoding to further shorten popular filepath prefixes.