My guess is because suffix trees are covered in data-structures courses, and then finding palindromes comes up as a possible application. Whereas Manacher's alg

My guess is because suffix trees are covered in data-structures courses, and then finding palindromes comes up as a possible application. Whereas Manacher's algorithm is pretty specifically a palindrome-finding algorithm, so people only know about it if they're looking for palindrome-finding algorithms in particular (as opposed to example applications of data structures). Although, it and variants have gotten some web press. A 2007 blog post was much passed around (http://johanjeuring.blogspot.com/2007/08/finding-palindromes.html http://johanjeuring.blogspot.com/2007/08/finding-palindromes...), which turned into some software (http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~jeuri101/homepage/palindromes/ http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~jeuri101/homepage/palindrome...). There's also a good exposition, and Python code, in another 2007 blog post (http://www.akalin.cx/longest-palindrome-linear-time http://www.akalin.cx/longest-palindrome-linear-time). I used the latter code to scan a local mirror of Project Gutenberg for word-unit palindromes, which are palindromes where words rather than letters are the units (http://www.kmjn.org/notes/word_unit_palindromes.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/word_unit_palindromes.html), which I why I know about it. It actually works for that with minimal modification, since it can operate on any Python sequence, not just strings.