Their simplicity and performance makes them an attractive alternative to the well known B-tree algorithms.
Testing reveals a dramatic speed advantage for skip lists when compared to B-trees.
In addition to the basic speed advantage of the algorithm, skip lists also show an additional speed advantage for large data sets. The binary search doubles the number of items covered at each iteration. The binary search is the way you play the old high-low guessing game. Binary trees have a bad worst-case performance when the tree becomes one sided. Figure 1 gives a visual example of a balanced tree for the numbers 1 through 7.