Web search result caching and prefetching

Lempel R., Silvestri F. Donato D.

A.1 Introductory and Survey  Search engine caching and prefetching  Search engine query result caching  Paging in Web search engines 

Caching is a well-known concept in systems with multiple tiers of storage. For simplicity, consider a system storing N objects in relatively slow memory, that also has a smaller but faster memory buffer ofproposed a two-level caching scheme that combines caching of search results with the caching of frequently accessed postings lists. Prefetching of search engine results was studied from a theoretical point of view by Lempel and Moran in 2002 [6]. They observed that the work involved in query evaluation scales in a sub-linear manner with the number of results computed by the search engine. Then they proceeded to minimize the computations involved in query evaluations by opti- mizing the number of results computed per query. The optimization is based on a workload function that models both (i) the computations performed by the search engine to produce search results and (ii) the probabilistic manner by which users advance through result pages in a search session.

Source: Encyclopedia of Database Systems, edited by Ling Liu, M. Tamer Özsu, pp. 3501–3506. New York: Springer, 2009

Publisher: Springer, New York, USA