Improved method, data structure and computer readable medium for searching
for digital information files. Files referenced by URLs may be quickly located
by finding a minimum unique prefix for the desired URL, breaking the prefix into
substrings, and traversing a trie data structure to find indices to another trie
data structure that will yield the physical location of the stored digital information
file. A node data structure may be used to construct the trie data structures,
and may be compressed to allow the tries to occupy less memory, thus allowing the
tries to be maintained in memory and less access to storage devices. The result
is faster retrieval times for digital information files.