Cache-based query processing for search engines

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In practice, a search engine may fail to serve a query due to various reasons such as hardware/network failures, excessive query load, lack of matching documents, or service contract limitations (e.g., the query rate limits for third-party users of a search service). In this kind of scenarios, where the backend search system is unable to generate answers to queries, approximate answers can be generated by exploiting the previously computed query results available in the result cache of the search engine.In this work, we propose two alternative strategies to implement this cache-based query processing idea. The first strategy aggregates the results of similar queries that are previously cached in order to create synthetic results for new queries. The second strategy forms an inverted index over the textual information (i.e., query terms and result snippets) present in the result cache and uses this index to answer new queries. Both approaches achieve reasonable result qualities compared to processing queries with an inverted index built on the collection. © 2012 ACM

The impact of using combinatorial optimisation for static caching of posting lists

Abstract. Caching posting lists can reduce the amount of disk I/O required to evaluate a query. Current methods use optimisation proce-dures for maximising the cache hit ratio. A recent method selects posting lists for static caching in a greedy manner and obtains higher hit rates than standard cache eviction policies such as LRU and LFU. However, a greedy method does not formally guarantee an optimal solution. We investigate whether the use of methods guaranteed, in theory, to find an approximately optimal solution would yield higher hit rates. Thus, we cast the selection of posting lists for caching as an integer linear pro-gramming problem and perform a series of experiments using heuristics from combinatorial optimisation (CCO) to find optimal solutions. Using simulated query logs we find that CCO yields comparable results to a greedy baseline using cache sizes between 200 and 1000 MB, with modest improvements for queries of length two to three

Second chance: A hybrid approach for dynamic result caching and prefetching in search engines

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Web search engines are known to cache the results of previously issued queries. The stored results typically contain the document summaries and some data that is used to construct the final search result page returned to the user. An alternative strategy is to store in the cache only the result document IDs, which take much less space, allowing results of more queries to be cached. These two strategies lead to an interesting trade-off between the hit rate and the average query response latency. In this work, in order to exploit this trade-off, we propose a hybrid result caching strategy where a dynamic result cache is split into two sections: an HTML cache and a docID cache. Moreover, using a realistic cost model, we evaluate the performance of different result prefetching strategies for the proposed hybrid cache and the baseline HTML-only cache. Finally, we propose a machine learning approach to predict singleton queries, which occur only once in the query stream. We show that when the proposed hybrid result caching strategy is coupled with the singleton query predictor, the hit rate is further improved. © 2013 ACM

On the Intrinsic Locality Properties of Web Reference Streams

There has been considerable work done in the study of Web reference streams: sequences of requests for Web objects. In particular, many studies have looked at the locality properties of such streams, because of the impact of locality on the design and performance of caching and prefetching systems. However, a general framework for understanding why reference streams exhibit given locality properties has not yet emerged. In this work we take a first step in this direction, based on viewing the Web as a set of reference streams that are transformed by Web components (clients, servers, and intermediaries). We propose a graph-based framework for describing this collection of streams and components. We identify three basic stream transformations that occur at nodes of the graph: aggregation, disaggregation and filtering, and we show how these transformations can be used to abstract the effects of different Web components on their associated reference streams. This view allows a structured approach to the analysis of why reference streams show given properties at different points in the Web. Applying this approach to the study of locality requires good metrics for locality. These metrics must meet three criteria: 1) they must accurately capture temporal locality; 2) they must be independent of trace artifacts such as trace length; and 3) they must not involve manual procedures or model-based assumptions. We describe two metrics meeting these criteria that each capture a different kind of temporal locality in reference streams. The popularity component of temporal locality is captured by entropy, while the correlation component is captured by interreference coefficient of variation. We argue that these metrics are more natural and more useful than previously proposed metrics for temporal locality. We use this framework to analyze a diverse set of Web reference traces. We find that this framework can shed light on how and why locality properties vary across different locations in the Web topology. For example, we find that filtering and aggregation have opposing effects on the popularity component of the temporal locality, which helps to explain why multilevel caching can be effective in the Web. Furthermore, we find that all transformations tend to diminish the correlation component of temporal locality, which has implications for the utility of different cache replacement policies at different points in the Web.National Science Foundation (ANI-9986397, ANI-0095988); CNPq-Brazi

Peer to Peer Information Retrieval: An Overview

Peer-to-peer technology is widely used for file sharing. In the past decade a number of prototype peer-to-peer information retrieval systems have been developed. Unfortunately, none of these have seen widespread real- world adoption and thus, in contrast with file sharing, information retrieval is still dominated by centralised solutions. In this paper we provide an overview of the key challenges for peer-to-peer information retrieval and the work done so far. We want to stimulate and inspire further research to overcome these challenges. This will open the door to the development and large-scale deployment of real-world peer-to-peer information retrieval systems that rival existing centralised client-server solutions in terms of scalability, performance, user satisfaction and freedom