An improved architecture for a network search engine (NSE) is disclosed herein as including an interface manager, one or more levels of a splitting engine, an array of data processing units (DPUs), and a cascade block. A method for using the improved NSE architecture to form an efficient pointer entry database is also provided. As described herein, the improved NSE architecture simultaneously provides high speed, search throughput, update rate and capacity, coupled with low power and fixed latency searches for all search key widths.