Scalability Challenges in Web Search Engines

By B Barla Cambazoglu and Ricardo Baeza-Yates

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3031011708
• ISBN13: 9783031011702
• Release Date: December 2015
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 122 Pages