A search algorithm used to quickly determine if an item of data is present. Developed by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, the Bloom filter is a long binary string of 0s. New data items are hashed using three different hashing algorithms, the results of which point to three different bit locations in the string, turning them to 1. When the data item is searched, the hashes are repeated, and if there is a 1 in all three locations in the Bloom string, the data item is known to be present. See
hash function.