26-37 Proximity Search in Databases.
Proximity is defined based on shortest paths between objects.
We have implemented a prototype search engine that uses this model to enable keyword searches over databases, and we have found it very effective for quickly finding relevant information. Computing the distance between objects in a graph stored on disk can be very expensive. Hence, we show how to build compact indexes that allow us to quickly find the distance between objects at search time. Experiments show that our algorithms are efficient and scale well. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by the permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment.