AVL-Trees for Localized Search

We present a data structure based on AVL-trees which allows to perform an insertion or a deletion in time O(log d) where'd is the distance of the position searched for from the finger which points to the end of the file. Moving a finger costs O(log d). This result demonstrates the power of the oldest basic data structure, the AVL-tree. A special case of interest is an efficient implementation of searchable priority queues such that Deletemin requires only constant time.