The world and internet are full of textual information. We search for information using textual queries and read websites, books and e-mails.

These are all strings from a computer science point of view. To make sense of all this information and make search efficient, search engines use many string algorithms. Moreover, the emerging field of personalized medicine uses many search algorithms to find disease-causing mutations in the human genome.

In this course, part of the Algorithms and Data Structures MicroMasters program, you will learn about:

• suffix trees;
• suffix arrays;
• how other brilliant algorithmic ideas help doctors to find differences between genomes;
• power lightning-fast Internet searches.