Bloom filters are popular mostly because they’re clever, but they can also be useful. E.g. Google Chrome’s safe browsing feature used Bloom filters to check wh

Bloom filters are popular mostly because they’re clever, but they can also be useful. E.g. Google Chrome’s safe browsing feature used Bloom filters to check whether a site might be flagged for malware, and if necessary query Google to check if it is actually flagged. It would have been impractical to download the full safe browsing dataset to every client, and also impractical to query Google for every single site visited. Bloom filters were a good solution (note: they’ve since moved to a custom data structure[1] which is also interesting.) [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=71832 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=71832