Browsing by Subject "Query logs"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
Characterizing web search queries that match very few or no results
(ACM, 2012-11) Altıngövde, İ. Ş.; Blanco, R.; Cambazoğlu, B. B.; Özcan, Rıfat; Sarıgil, Erdem; Ulusoy, Özgür
Despite the continuous efforts to improve the web search quality, a non-negligible fraction of user queries end up with very few or even no matching results in leading web search engines. In this work, we provide a detailed characterization of such queries based on an analysis of a real-life query log. Our experimental setup allows us to characterize the queries with few/no results and compare the mechanisms employed by the major search engines in handling them.
Open Access
Cost-aware strategies for query result caching in Web search engines
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2011) Ozcan, R.; Altingovde, I. S.; Ulusoy, O.
Search engines and large-scale IR systems need to cache query results for efficiency and scalability purposes. Static and dynamic caching techniques (as well as their combinations) are employed to effectively cache query results. In this study, we propose cost-aware strategies for static and dynamic caching setups. Our research is motivated by two key observations: (i) query processing costs may significantly vary among different queries, and (ii) the processing cost of a query is not proportional to its popularity (i.e., frequency in the previous logs). The first observation implies that cache misses have different, that is, nonuniform, costs in this context. The latter observation implies that typical caching policies, solely based on query popularity, can not always minimize the total cost. Therefore, we propose to explicitly incorporate the query costs into the caching policies. Simulation results using two large Web crawl datasets and a real query log reveal that the proposed approach improves overall system performance in terms of the average query execution time. © 2011 ACM.
Open Access
Query forwarding in geographically distributed search engines
(ACM, 2010) Cambazoglu, B.B.; Varol, Emre; Kayaaslan, Enver; Aykanat, Cevdet; Baeza-Yates, R.
Query forwarding is an important technique for preserving the result quality in distributed search engines where the index is geographically partitioned over multiple search sites. The key component in query forwarding is the thresholding algorithm by which the forwarding decisions are given. In this paper, we propose a linear-programming-based thresholding algorithm that significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art in terms of achieved search efficiency values. Moreover, we evaluate a greedy heuristic for partial index replication and investigate the impact of result cache freshness on query forwarding performance. Finally, we present some optimizations that improve the performance further, under certain conditions. We evaluate the proposed techniques by simulations over a real-life setting, using a large query log and a document collection obtained from Yahoo!. © 2010 ACM.
Open Access
Timestamp-based result cache invalidation for web search engines
(ACM, 2011) Alıcı, Sadiye; Altingovde I.S.; Özcan, Rıfat; Cambazoglu, B.B.; Ulusoy, Özgür
The result cache is a vital component for efficiency of large-scale web search engines, and maintaining the freshness of cached query results is the current research challenge. As a remedy to this problem, our work proposes a new mechanism to identify queries whose cached results are stale. The basic idea behind our mechanism is to maintain and compare generation time of query results with update times of posting lists and documents to decide on staleness of query results. The proposed technique is evaluated using a Wikipedia document collection with real update information and a real-life query log. We show that our technique has good prediction accuracy, relative to a baseline based on the time-to-live mechanism. Moreover, it is easy to implement and incurs less processing overhead on the system relative to a recently proposed, more sophisticated invalidation mechanism.