This document presents an analysis of similarity search methods for high-dimensional data. It finds that as the number of dimensions increases, the performance of partitioning and clustering methods deteriorates and complexity increases to O(N). The document establishes lower bounds to show that any partitioning scheme will degrade to a sequential scan when dimensions are sufficiently large. It is also shown that the expected nearest neighbor distance grows with dimensionality. Finally, the VA-file method is presented as offering the best performance for high dimensional data, as it can filter data during search using vector approximations to avoid a full sequential scan.