A. Andersson and S. Nilsson. Efficient implementation of suffix trees.
Software---Practice and Experience, 25(2):129-141, 1995.

An algorithm for searching in a binary search tree using two-way comparisons is presented. The number of comparisons required by this algorithm is only one more than when using three-way comparisons. Since most high-level programming languages do not supply three-way comparisons, the number of comparisons used de facto are reduced by a factor of two. We give experimental results to indicate the speedup that may be achieved by the presented algorithm.

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