Scalability challenges in web search engines

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.