Patent ID: 8799264
Filing Date: 2014-08-05
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method for improving the efficiency of a search engine in accessing, searching and retrieving information in the form of documents stored in document or content repositories, comprising: using an indexing subsystem of the search engine to crawl the stored documents and generate an index, wherein applying a user search query to the index returns a result set of at least some query-matching documents, wherein the search engine comprises an array of search nodes hosted on one or more servers, wherein the array of search nodes comprises r rows and c columns characterized by classifying a query keyword in two dimensions, a first dimension being a posting list size and a second dimension being an arrival rate that is determined using an arrival time of each query keyword, and wherein the index of the search engine is configured on a basis of one or more document properties, at least one of a fault-tolerance level, a required search performance, document meta-properties, and an optimal resource utilization; partitioning the index; replicating the index to create replicas that each comprise a same content as each of the other replicas; distributing the partitioned and replicated index over the array of search nodes such that index partitions and replicas thereof are assigned to the servers hosting the array of search nodes, wherein distributing the index takes into account at least one of: posting lists size differences and posting lists popularity differences; and processing a search query on the basis of the distributed index.