This simplifies searches a great deal. It also means that UTF-16 is self-synchronizing on 16-bit words: whether a code unit starts a character can be determined without examining earlier code units (i.e. the type of code unit can be determined by the ranges of values in which it falls). UTF-8 shares these advantages, but many earlier multi-byte encoding schemes (such as Shift JIS and other Asian multi-byte encodings) did not allow unambiguous searching and could only be synchronized by re-parsing from the start of the string (UTF-16 is not self-synchronizing if one byte is lost or if traversal starts at a random byte).