Search

In this book, we aim to provide a fairly comprehensive overview of the scalability and efficiency challenges in large-scale web search engines. More specifically, we cover the issues involved in the design of three separate systems that are commonly available in every web-scale search engine: web crawling, indexing, and query processing systems. We present the performance challenges encountered in these systems and review a wide range of design alternatives employed as solution to these challenges, specifically focusing on algorithmic and architectural optimizations. We discuss the available optimizations at different computational granularities, ranging from a single computer node to a collection of data centers. We provide some hints to both the practitioners and theoreticians involved in the field about the way large-scale web search engines operate and the adopted design choices. Moreover, we survey the efficiency literature, providing pointers to a large number of relatively important research papers. Finally, we discuss some open research problems in the context of search engine efficiency.

In this book, we aim to provide a fairly comprehensive overview of the scalability and efficiency challenges in large-scale web search engines. More specifically, we cover the issues involved in the design of three separate systems that are commonly available in every web-scale search engine: web crawling, indexing, and query processing systems. We present the performance challenges encountered in these systems and review a wide range of design alternatives employed as solution to these challenges, specifically focusing on algorithmic and architectural optimizations. We discuss the available optimizations at different computational granularities, ranging from a single computer node to a collection of data centers. We provide some hints to both the practitioners and theoreticians involved in the field about the way large-scale web search engines operate and the adopted design choices. Moreover, we survey the efficiency literature, providing pointers to a large number of relatively important research papers. Finally, we discuss some open research problems in the context of search engine efficiency.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012, held in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2012. The 37 full papers, 28 poster papers and 7 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The contributions are organized in sections named: query representation; blogs and online-community search; semi-structured retrieval; evaluation; applications; retrieval models; image and video retrieval; text and content classification, categorisation, clustering; systems efficiency; industry track; and posters.