you can either compress the data for general use, or optimize for particular application , i.e. search index, in the latter case the compression ratio can be or

you can either compress the data for general use, or optimize for particular application , i.e. search index, in the latter case the compression ratio can be orders of magnitude better than general-purpose I think improving general compression is of marginal importance given the abundance of existing compression algorithms, it is mostly a solved problem with many decades of productive research behind it the biggest ‘bang for the buck’ is in optimizing for particular applications such as search, gene detection, snp calling, alignment etc