The Search Engine Architecture CSCI 572: Information Retrieval and Search Engines Summer 2011

Outline Introduction Google Summary The PageRank algorithm The Google Architecture Architectural components Architectural interconnections Architectural data structures Evaluation of Google Summary

Problems with search engines circa the last decade Human maintenance Subjective Example: Ranking hits based on $$$ Automated search engines Quality of result Neglect to take user’s context into account Searching process High quality results aren’t always at the top of the list

The Typical Search Engine Process In what stages is the most time spent?

How to scale to modern times? Currently Efficient index Petabyte scale storage space Efficient Crawling Cost effectiveness of hardware Future Qualitative context Maintaining localization data Perhaps send indexing to clients Client computers help gather Google’s index in a distributed, decentralized fashion?

Google The whole idea is to keep up with the growth of the web Design Goals: -Remove Junk Results -Scalable document indices Use of link structure to improve quality filtering Use as an academic digital library Provide search engine datasets Search engine infrastructure and evolution

Google Archival of information Leverage of usage data Use of compression Efficient data structures Proprietary file system Leverage of usage data PageRank algorithm Sort of a “lineage” of a source of information Citation graph

PageRank Algorithm With damping factor d Numerical method to calculate page’s importance this approach might well be followed by people doing research Page Rank of a page A With damping factor d Where PR(x) = Page Rank of page X Where C(x) = the amount of outgoing links from page x Where T1…Tn is the set of pages with incoming links to page A PR(A)=(1-d)+d(PR(T1)/C(T1)+…+PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) It’s actually a bit more complicated than it first looks For instance, what’s PR(T1) and PR(T2) and so on?

PageRank Algorithm An excellent explanation http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/ Since the PR(A) equation is a probability distribution over all web pages linking to web page A… And because of the (1-d) term and the d*(PR….) term The PageRanks of all the web pages on the web will sum to 1

PageRank: Example So, where do you start? It turns out that you can effectively “guess” what the PageRanks for the web pages are initially In our example, guess 0 for all of the pages Then you run the PR function to calculate PR for all the web pages iteratively You do this until… The page ranks for each web page stop changing in each iteration They “settle down”

Below is the iterative calculation that we would run PageRank: Example Below is the iterative calculation that we would run PR(a) = 1 - $damp + $damp * PR(c); PR(b) = 1 - $damp + $damp * (PR(a)/2) PR(c) = 1 - $damp + $damp * (PR(a)/2 + PR(b) + PR(d)); PR(d) = 1 - $damp;

PageRank Algorithm: First 18 iterations a: 0.00000 b: 0.00000 c: 0.00000 d: 0.00000 a: 0.15000 b: 0.21375 c: 0.39544 d: 0.15000 a: 0.48612 b: 0.35660 c: 0.78721 d: 0.15000 a: 0.81913 b: 0.49813 c: 1.04904 d: 0.15000 a: 1.04169 b: 0.59272 c: 1.22403 d: 0.15000 a: 1.19042 b: 0.65593 c: 1.34097 d: 0.15000 a: 1.28982 b: 0.69818 c: 1.41912 d: 0.15000 a: 1.35626 b: 0.72641 c: 1.47136 d: 0.15000 a: 1.40065 b: 0.74528 c: 1.50626 d: 0.15000 a: 1.43032 b: 0.75789 c: 1.52959 d: 0.15000 a: 1.45015 b: 0.76632 c: 1.54518 d: 0.15000 a: 1.46341 b: 0.77195 c: 1.55560 d: 0.15000 a: 1.47226 b: 0.77571 c: 1.56257 d: 0.15000 a: 1.47818 b: 0.77823 c: 1.56722 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48214 b: 0.77991 c: 1.57033 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48478 b: 0.78103 c: 1.57241 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48655 b: 0.78178 c: 1.57380 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48773 b: 0.78228 c: 1.57473 d: 0.15000 Still changing too much

PageRank: next 13 iterations a: 1.48852 b: 0.78262 c: 1.57535 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48904 b: 0.78284 c: 1.57576 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48940 b: 0.78299 c: 1.57604 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48963 b: 0.78309 c: 1.57622 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48979 b: 0.78316 c: 1.57635 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48990 b: 0.78321 c: 1.57643 d: 0.15000 a: 1.48997 b: 0.78324 c: 1.57649 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49001 b: 0.78326 c: 1.57652 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49004 b: 0.78327 c: 1.57655 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49007 b: 0.78328 c: 1.57656 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49008 b: 0.78328 c: 1.57657 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49009 b: 0.78329 c: 1.57658 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49009 b: 0.78329 c: 1.57659 d: 0.15000 Starting to stabilize

PageRank: Last 9 iterations a: 1.49010 b: 0.78329 c: 1.57659 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49011 b: 0.78329 c: 1.57660 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49011 b: 0.78330 c: 1.57660 d: 0.15000 a: 1.49011 b: 0.78330 c: 1.57660 d: 0.15000 Average pagerank = 1.0000 Stabilized

Google Architecture Key components Interconnections Data structures A reference architecture for search engines?

Google Data Components BigFiles Repository Use zlib to compress Lexicon Word base Hit Lists Word->document ID map Document Indexing Forward Index Inverted Index

Google File System (GFS) BigFiles A.k.a. Google’s Proprietary Filesystem 64-bit addressable Compression Conventional operating systems don’t suffice No explanation of why? GFS: http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html

Google Key Data Components Repository Stores full text of web pages Use zlib to compress Zlib less efficient than bzip Tradeoff of time complexity versus space efficiency Bzip more space efficient, but slower Why is it important to compress the pages?

Google Lexicon Lexicon Why is it important to have a lexicon? Contains 14 million words Implemented as a hash table of pointers to words Full explanation beyond the scope of this discussion Why is it important to have a lexicon? Tokenization Analysis Language Identification SPAM

Mapping queries to hits HitLists wordID->(docID,position,font,capitalization) mapping Takes up most of the space in the forward and inverted indices Types: Fancy,Plain,Anchor

Document Indexing Document Indexing Forward Index Inverted Index docIDs->wordIDs Partially sorted Duplicated doc IDs Makes it easier for final indexing and coding Inverted Index wordIDs->docIDs 2 sets of inverted barrels

Crawling and Indexing Crawling Indexing Distributed, Parallel Social issues Bringing down web servers: politeness Copyright issues Text versus code Indexing Developed their own web page parser Barrels Distribution of compressed documents Sorting

Google’s Query Evaluation 1: Parse the query 2: Convert words into WordIDs Using Lexicon 3: Select the barrels that contain documents which match the WordIDs 4: Search through documents in the selected barrels until one is discovered that matches all the search terms 5: Compute that document’s rank (using PageRank as one of the components) 6: Repeat step 4 until no documents are found and we’ve went through all the barrels 7: Sort the set of returned documents by document rank and return the top k documents

Google Evaluation Performed by generating numerical results Query satisfaction Bill Clinton Example Storage requirements 55GB Total System Performance 9 days to download 26 million pages 63 hours to get the final 11 million (at the time) Search Performance Between 1 and 10 seconds for most queries (at the time)

Wrapup Loads of future work Even at that time, there were issues of: Information extraction from semi-structured sources (such as web pages) Still an active area of research Search engines as a digital library What services, APIs and toolkits should a search engine provide? What storage methods are the most efficient? From 2005 to 2010 to ??? Enhancing metadata Automatic markup and generation What are the appropriate fields? Automatic Concept Extraction Present the Searcher with a context Searching languages: beyond context-free queries Other types of search: Facet, GIS, etc.

The Future? User poses keyword query search “Google-like” result page comes back Along with each link returned, there will be A “Concept Map” outlining – using extraction methods – what the “real” content of the document is This basically allows you to “visually” see what the page rank is Discover information visually Existing evidence that this works well http://vivisimo.com/ Carrot2/3 clustering

Software Architecture Concept Map Chris’s Homepage http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann Data Publications Software Data Grid Science Data Systems Software Architecture