The bitap algorithm for exact string searching was invented by Bálint Dömölki in 1964 and extended by R. K. Shyamasundar in 1977, before being reinvented by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Gaston Gonnet in 1989 (one chapter of first author's PhD thesis) which also extended it to handle classes of characters, wildcards, and mismatches. In 1991, it was extended by Manber and Wu to handle also insertions and deletions (full fuzzy string searching). This algorithm was later improved by Baeza-Yates and Navarro in 1996.
