1. A computer program product comprising a non-transitory machine-readable medium that stores a program, the program being executed by a machine to perform a method of compressing and searching genomic sequence data, comprising: first program code adapted to compress an original data sequence into a data structure having first and second portions, the first portion comprising the original data sequence with one or more sequence fragments therein that have been found sufficiently similar to previously-identified fragments being replaced by links to similarly-identified fragments, the second portion comprising the links; and second program code adapted to use the first and second portions of the data structure, in lieu of the original data sequence, to identify a portion of the genomic sequence data in response to a query.