web search engines
DESCRIPTION
Web search engines. Paolo Ferragina Dipartimento di Informatica Università di Pisa. The Web: Size: more than tens of billions of pages Language and encodings: hundreds… Distributed authorship: SPAM, format-less,… Dynamic: in one year 35% survive, 20% untouched The User: - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Two main difficulties
The Web: Size: more than tens of billions of pages
Language and encodings: hundreds…
Distributed authorship: SPAM, format-less,…
Dynamic: in one year 35% survive, 20% untouched
The User: Query composition: short (2.5 terms avg) and imprecise
Query results: 85% users look at just one result-page
Several needs: Informational, Navigational, Transactional
Extracting “significant data” is difficult !!
Matching “user needs” is difficult !!
Evolution of Search Engines First generation -- use only on-page, web-text data
Word frequency and language
Second generation -- use off-page, web-graph data Link (or connectivity) analysis Anchor-text (How people refer to a page)
Third generation -- answer “the need behind the query” Focus on “user need”, rather than on query Integrate multiple data-sources Click-through data
1995-1997 AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc
1998: Google
Fourth generation Information Supply[Andrei Broder, VP emerging search tech, Yahoo! Research]
Google, Yahoo,
MSN, ASK,………
Is it good ?
How fast does it index Number of documents/hour (Average document size)
How fast does it search Latency as a function of index size
Expressiveness of the query language
Measures for a search engine
All of the preceding criteria are measurable
The key measure: user happiness…useless answers won’t make a user happy
Happiness: elusive to measure
Commonest approach is given by the relevance of search results How do we measure it ?
Requires 3 elements:1. A benchmark document collection2. A benchmark suite of queries3. A binary assessment of either Relevant or
Irrelevant for each query-doc pair
Evaluating an IR system
Standard benchmarks TREC: National Institute of Standards and
Testing (NIST) has run large IR testbed for
many years
Other doc collections: marked by human
experts, for each query and for each doc,
Relevant or Irrelevant
On the Web everything is more complicated since we cannot mark the entire corpus !!
Precision: % docs retrieved that are relevant [issue “junk” found]
Precision vs. Recall
Relevant
Retrieved
collection
Recall: % docs relevant that are retrieved [issue “info” found]
How to compute them
Precision: fraction of retrieved docs that are relevant Recall: fraction of relevant docs that are retrieved
Precision P = tp/(tp + fp) Recall R = tp/(tp + fn)
Relevant Not Relevant
Retrieved tp (true positive) fp (false positive)
Not Retrieved
fn (false negative) tn (true negative)
Some considerations
Can get high recall (but low precision) by retrieving all docs for all queries!
Recall is a non-decreasing function of the number of docs retrieved
Precision usually decreases
Precision-Recall curve
We measures Precision at various levels of Recall Note: it is an AVERAGE over many queries
precision
recall
x
x
x
x
F measure
Combined measure (weighted harmonic mean):
People usually use balanced F1 measure
i.e., with = ½ thus 1/F = ½ (1/P + 1/R)
Use this if you need to optimize a single measure
that balances precision and recall.
RP
F1
)1(1
1
The web-graph: properties
Paolo FerraginaDipartimento di Informatica
Università di Pisa
Reading 19.1 and 19.2
The Web’s Characteristics
Size 1 trillion of pages is available (Google 7/08)
50 billion static pages 5-40K per page => terabytes & terabytes Size grows every day!!
Change 8% new pages, 25% new links change weekly Life time of about 10 days
SCCSCC
WCCWCC
Some definitions
Weakly connected components (WCC) Set of nodes such that from any node can go to any node via
an undirected path. Strongly connected components (SCC)
Set of nodes such that from any node can go to any node via a directed path.
Find the CORE Iterate the following process:
Pick a random vertex v Compute all nodes reached from v: O(v) Compute all nodes that reach v: I(v) Compute SCC(v):= I(v) ∩ O(v) Check whether it is the largest SCC
If the CORE is about ¼ of the vertices, after 20 iterations, Pb to not find the core < 1% (given that the graph is available).
Compute SCCs
Classical Algorithm:1) DFS(G)2) Transpose G in GT
3) DFS(GT) following vertices in decreasing order of the time their visit ended at step 1.
4) Every tree is a SCC.
DFS is hard to compute on disk: no locality
DFS
DFS(u:vertex)color[u]=GRAY
d[u] time time +1foreach v in succ[u] do
if (color[v]=WHITE) then p[v] u
DFS(v)endForcolor[u] BLACKf[u] time time + 1
Classical Approach
main(){ foreach vertex v do
color[v]=WHITE
endFor
foreach vertex v do
if (color[v]==WHITE)
DFS(v);
endFor
}
Semi-External DFS
Key observation: If bit-array fits in internal memory than a DFS takes |V| + |E|/B disk accesses.
• Bit array of nodes (visited or not)
• Array of successors
• Stack of the DFS-recursion
What about million/billion nodes?
Key observation: A forest is a DFS forest if and only if there are no FORWARD CROSS edges among the non-tree edges
NO
Algorithm ? Construct incrementally a tentative DFS forest which minimizes the # of those edges (overall), in passes...
A Semi-External DFS
• Bit array of nodes (visited or not)
• Array of successors (stack of the DFS-recursion)
Key assumption: We assume that 2n edges, and the auxiliary data structures, fit in memory. Rearrange nodes in adj-lists, the ones with large subtrees go to the front
Observing Web Graph
We do not know which percentage of it we know
The only way to discover the graph structure of the web is via large scale crawls
Warning: the picture might be distorted by Size limitation of the crawl Crawling rules Perturbations of the "natural" process of birth and
death of nodes and links
Why is it interesting?
Largest artifact ever conceived by the human
Exploit its structure of the Web for Crawl strategies Search Spam detection Discovering communities on the web Classification/organization
Predict the evolution of the Web Sociological understanding
Many other large graphs… Physical network graph
V = Routers E = communication links
The “cosine” graph (undirected, weighted) V = static web pages E = semantic distance between pages
Query-Log graph (bipartite, weighted) V = queries and URL E = (q,u) u is a result for q, and has been clicked by
some user who issued q
Social graph (undirected, unweighted) V = users E = (x,y) if x knows y (facebook, address book, email,..)
What is the size of the web ?
Issues The web is really infinite
Dynamic content, e.g., calendar
Static web contains syntactic duplication, mostly due to mirroring (~30%)
Some servers are seldom connected
Who cares? Media, and consequently the user Engine design
What can we attempt to measure?
The relative sizes of search engines Document extension: e.g. engines index pages not
yet crawled, by indexing anchor-text. Document restriction: All engines restrict what is
indexed (first n words, only relevant words, etc.)
The coverage of a search engine relative to another particular crawling process.
A B = (1/2) * Size A
A B = (1/6) * Size B
(1/2)*Size A = (1/6)*Size B
Size A / Size B = (1/6)/(1/2) = 1/3
Sample URLs randomly from A
Check if contained in B and vice versa
A B
Each test involves: (i) Sampling URL (ii) Checking URL
Relative Size from OverlapGiven two engines A and B
Sec. 19.5
Sampling URLs
Ideal strategy: Generate a random URL and check for containment in each index.
Problem: Random URLs are hard to find!
Approach 1: Generate a random URL surely contained in a given search engine
Approach 2: Random walks or random IP addresses
#1: Random URL in SE via random queries
Generate random query: Lexicon: 400,000+ words from a web crawl
Conjunctive Queries: w1 and w2
e.g., vocalists AND rsi
Get 100 result URLs from engine A Choose a random URL as the candidate to check
for presence in search engine B (next slide) This induces a probability weight W(p) for each
page.
Conjecture: W(SEA) / W(SEB) ~ |SEA| / |SEB|
URL checking
Download D at address URL. Get list of words. Use 8 low frequency words as AND query to B Check if D is present in result set.
Problems: Near duplicates Engine time-outs Is 8-word query good enough?
Advantages & disadvantages
Statistically sound under the induced weight. Biases induced by random query
Query bias: Favors content-rich pages in the language(s) of the lexicon
Ranking bias [Solution: Use conjunctive queries & fetch all]
Query restriction bias: engine might not deal properly with 8 words conjunctive query
Malicious bias: Sabotage by engine Operational Problems: Time-outs, failures, engine
inconsistencies, index modification.
#2: Random IP addresses
Find a web server at the given IP address If there’s one
Collect all pages from server
From this, choose a page at random
Advantages & disadvantages Advantages
Clean statistics Independent of crawling strategies
Disadvantages
Many hosts might share one IP, or not accept requests
No guarantee all pages are linked to root page, and
thus can be collected.
Power law for # pages/hosts generates bias towards
sites with few pages.
Conclusions
No sampling solution is perfect.
Lots of new ideas .......but the problem is getting harder
Quantitative studies are fascinating and a good research problem
Definition
Directed graph G = (V,E) V = URLs, E = (u,v) if u has an hyperlink to v
Isolated URLs are ignored (no IN & no OUT)
Three key properties: Skewed distribution: Pb that a node has x links is 1/x, ≈
2.1
The In-degree distribution
Altavista crawl, 1999 WebBase Crawl 2001
Indegree follows power law distributionk
ku 1
])(degree-inPr[
2.1
This is true also for: out-degree, size components,...
Definition
Directed graph G = (V,E) V = URLs, E = (u,v) if u has an hyperlink to v
Isolated URLs are ignored (no IN, no OUT)
Three key properties: Skewed distribution: Pb that a node has x links is 1/x, ≈
2.1
Locality: usually most of the hyperlinks point to other URLs on
the same host (about 80%).
Similarity: pages close in lexicographic order tend to share
many outgoing lists
The library WebGraph
Successor list S(x) = {s1-x, s
2-s
1-1, ..., s
k-s
k-1-1}
For negative entries:
Uncompressed adjacency list
Adjacency list with compressed gaps
(locality)
Copy-lists: close nodes sharemany successors
Uncompressed adjacency list
Each bit of the copy-list informs whether the corresponding successor of y is also a successor of the reference x;
The reference index is chosen in [0,W] that gives the best compression.
Adjacency list with copy lists
(similarity)
Reference chainspossibly limited
Copy-blocks = RLE(Copy-list)
Adjacency list with copy lists.
The first copy block is 0 if the copy list starts with 0;
Each RLE-length is decremented by one for all blocks
The last block is omitted (we know the length from Outd);
Adjacency list with copy blocks
(RLE on bit sequences)1,3
3
Extra-nodes: Compressing Intervals
Adjacency list with copy blocks.
Consecutivity
in extra-nodes
0 = (15-15)*2 (positive)
2 = (23-19)-2 (jump >= 2)
600 = (316-16)*212 = (22-16)*2 (positive)
3018 = 3041-22-1 (difference)
Intervals: encoded by left extreme and length
Int. length: decremented by Lmin
= 2
Residuals: differences between residuals, or the source (the first)
This is a Java and C++ lib(≈3 bits/edge)