Site-based dynamic pruning for query processing in search engines

Web search engines typically index and retrieve at the page level. In this study, we investigate a dynamic pruning strategy that allows the query processor to first determine the most promising websites and then proceed with the similarity computations for those pages only within these sites

Index ordering by query-independent measures

Conventional approaches to information retrieval search through all applicable entries in an inverted file for a particular collection in order to find those documents with the highest scores. For particularly large collections this may be extremely time consuming. A solution to this problem is to only search a limited amount of the collection at query-time, in order to speed up the retrieval process. In doing this we can also limit the loss in retrieval efficacy (in terms of accuracy of results). The way we achieve this is to firstly identify the most “important” documents within the collection, and sort documents within inverted file lists in order of this “importance”. In this way we limit the amount of information to be searched at query time by eliminating documents of lesser importance, which not only makes the search more efficient, but also limits loss in retrieval accuracy. Our experiments, carried out on the TREC Terabyte collection, report significant savings, in terms of number of postings examined, without significant loss of effectiveness when based on several measures of importance used in isolation, and in combination. Our results point to several ways in which the computation cost of searching large collections of documents can be significantly reduced

Stochastic Query Covering for Fast Approximate Document Retrieval

We design algorithms that, given a collection of documents and a distribution over user queries, return a small subset of the document collection in such a way that we can efficiently provide high-quality answers to user queries using only the selected subset. This approach has applications when space is a constraint or when the query-processing time increases significantly with the size of the collection. We study our algorithms through the lens of stochastic analysis and prove that even though they use only a small fraction of the entire collection, they can provide answers to most user queries, achieving a performance close to the optimal. To complement our theoretical findings, we experimentally show the versatility of our approach by considering two important cases in the context of Web search. In the first case, we favor the retrieval of documents that are relevant to the query, whereas in the second case we aim for document diversification. Both the theoretical and the experimental analysis provide strong evidence of the potential value of query covering in diverse application scenarios

Embedding Web-based Statistical Translation Models in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Although more and more language pairs are covered by machine translation services, there are still many pairs that lack translation resources. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an application which needs translation functionality of a relatively low level of sophistication since current models for information retrieval (IR) are still based on a bag-of-words. The Web provides a vast resource for the automatic construction of parallel corpora which can be used to train statistical translation models automatically. The resulting translation models can be embedded in several ways in a retrieval model. In this paper, we will investigate the problem of automatically mining parallel texts from the Web and different ways of integrating the translation models within the retrieval process. Our experiments on standard test collections for CLIR show that the Web-based translation models can surpass commercial MT systems in CLIR tasks. These results open the perspective of constructing a fully automatic query translation device for CLIR at a very low cost.Comment: 37 page

Development and Performance Evaluation of a Real-Time Web Search Engine

As the World Wide Web continues to grow, the tools to retrieve the information must develop in terms of locating web pages, categorizing content, and retrieving quality pages. Web search engines have enhanced the online experience by making pages easier to find. Search engines have made a science of cataloging page content, but the data can age, becoming outdated and irrelevant. By searching pages in real time in a localized area of the web, information that is retrieved is guaranteed to be available at the time of the search. The real-time search engines intriguing premise provides an overwhelming challenge. Since the web is searched in real time, the engine\u27s execution will take longer than traditional search engines. The challenge is to determine what factors can enhance the performance of the real-time search engine. This research takes a look at three components: traversal methodologies for searching the web, utilizing concurrently executing spiders, and implementing a caching resource to reduce the execution time of the real-time search engine. These components represent some basic methodologies to improve performance. By determining which implementations provide the best response, a better and faster real-time search engine can become a useful searching tool for Internet users

Static index pruning in web search engines: Combining term and document popularities with query views

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Static index pruning techniques permanently remove a presumably redundant part of an inverted file, to reduce the file size and query processing time. These techniques differ in deciding which parts of an index can be removed safely; that is, without changing the top-ranked query results. As defined in the literature, the query view of a document is the set of query terms that access to this particular document, that is, retrieves this document among its top results. In this paper, we first propose using query views to improve the quality of the top results compared against the original results. We incorporate query views in a number of static pruning strategies, namely term-centric, document-centric, term popularity based and document access popularity based approaches, and show that the new strategies considerably outperform their counterparts especially for the higher levels of pruning and for both disjunctive and conjunctive query processing. Additionally, we combine the notions of term and document access popularity to form new pruning strategies, and further extend these strategies with the query views. The new strategies improve the result quality especially for the conjunctive query processing, which is the default and most common search mode of a search engine

Static index pruning in web search engines

Static index pruning techniques permanently remove a presumably redundant part of an inverted file, to reduce the file size and query processing time. These techniques differ in deciding which parts of an index can be removed safely; that is, without changing the top-ranked query results. As defined in the literature, the query view of a document is the set of query terms that access to this particular document, that is, retrieves this document among its top results. In this paper, we first propose using query views to improve the quality of the top results compared against the original results. We incorporate query views in a number of static pruning strategies, namely term-centric, document-centric, term popularity based and document access popularity based approaches, and show that the new strategies considerably outperform their counterparts especially for the higher levels of pruning and for both disjunctive and conjunctive query processing. Additionally, we combine the notions of term and document access popularity to form new pruning strategies, and further extend these strategies with the query views. The new strategies improve the result quality especially for the conjunctive query processing, which is the default and most common search mode of a search engine

Distributed top-k aggregation queries at large

Top-k query processing is a fundamental building block for efficient ranking in a large number of applications. Efficiency is a central issue, especially for distributed settings, when the data is spread across different nodes in a network. This paper introduces novel optimization methods for top-k aggregation queries in such distributed environments. The optimizations can be applied to all algorithms that fall into the frameworks of the prior TPUT and KLEE methods. The optimizations address three degrees of freedom: 1) hierarchically grouping input lists into top-k operator trees and optimizing the tree structure, 2) computing data-adaptive scan depths for different input sources, and 3) data-adaptive sampling of a small subset of input sources in scenarios with hundreds or thousands of query-relevant network nodes. All optimizations are based on a statistical cost model that utilizes local synopses, e.g., in the form of histograms, efficiently computed convolutions, and estimators based on order statistics. The paper presents comprehensive experiments, with three different real-life datasets and using the ns-2 network simulator for a packet-level simulation of a large Internet-style network

Efficient query processing for scalable web search

Search engines are exceptionally important tools for accessing information in today’s world. In satisfying the information needs of millions of users, the effectiveness (the quality of the search results) and the efficiency (the speed at which the results are returned to the users) of a search engine are two goals that form a natural trade-off, as techniques that improve the effectiveness of the search engine can also make it less efficient. Meanwhile, search engines continue to rapidly evolve, with larger indexes, more complex retrieval strategies and growing query volumes. Hence, there is a need for the development of efficient query processing infrastructures that make appropriate sacrifices in effectiveness in order to make gains in efficiency. This survey comprehensively reviews the foundations of search engines, from index layouts to basic term-at-a-time (TAAT) and document-at-a-time (DAAT) query processing strategies, while also providing the latest trends in the literature in efficient query processing, including the coherent and systematic reviews of techniques such as dynamic pruning and impact-sorted posting lists as well as their variants and optimisations. Our explanations of query processing strategies, for instance the WAND and BMW dynamic pruning algorithms, are presented with illustrative figures showing how the processing state changes as the algorithms progress. Moreover, acknowledging the recent trends in applying a cascading infrastructure within search systems, this survey describes techniques for efficiently integrating effective learned models, such as those obtained from learning-to-rank techniques. The survey also covers the selective application of query processing techniques, often achieved by predicting the response times of the search engine (known as query efficiency prediction), and making per-query tradeoffs between efficiency and effectiveness to ensure that the required retrieval speed targets can be met. Finally, the survey concludes with a summary of open directions in efficient search infrastructures, namely the use of signatures, real-time, energy-efficient and modern hardware and software architectures