  We study data structure problems related to document indexing and pattern
matching queries and our main contribution is to show that the pointer machine
model of computation can be extremely useful in proving high and unconditional
lower bounds that cannot be obtained in any other known model of computation
with the current techniques. Often our lower bounds match the known space-query
time trade-off curve and in fact for all the problems considered, there is a
very good and reasonable match between the our lower bounds and the known upper
bounds, at least for some choice of input parameters. The problems that we
consider are set intersection queries (both the reporting variant and the
semi-group counting variant), indexing a set of documents for two-pattern
queries, or forbidden- pattern queries, or queries with wild-cards, and
indexing an input set of gapped-patterns (or two-patterns) to find those
matching a document given at the query time.
