#inverted index

6 inverted index interview questions, asked at Anthropic, Meta, Airbnb and 2 more companies. Last asked Aug 2026.

Design search over user posts with boolean queriesSystem designDesign search over users' status posts on a large social network. Queries combine words with AND and OR (for example cats AND (dogs OR birds)), and new posts should become…
Last asked Aug 2026
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Recipe manager with ingredient searchCodingBuild an in-memory recipe book. Each recipe has a name, an ordered list of ingredients and an ordered list of steps. The work comes in two parts; finish part 1 before you start…
Last asked Jul 2026
Searchable sentence indexCodingBuild an index over a collection of sentences so you can quickly find the sentences that contain given words.
Last asked May 2026
Design keyword search over postsSystem designUsers publish short posts or status updates; others search them by keyword, including over years of history, and see the matching posts ranked. Cover ingesting new posts into the…
Last asked Oct 2025
Co-occurring tags for a tag filterCodingEach title in a catalog carries a group of tags that were assigned together, for example "drama", "british", "crime". You get all the groups as a list of lists of strings, groups…
In-memory note-taking system with keyword searchCodingDesign an in-memory note-taking system, SecondBrainSystem. Each note gets a unique id and carries metadata about when it was created and last modified. Callers pass the current…