Searching the Web

Abstract

We offer an overview of current Web search engine design. After introducing a generic search engine architecture, we examine each engine component in turn. We cover crawling, local Web page storage, indexing, and the use of link analysis for boosting search performance. The most common design and implementation techniques for each of these components are presented. We draw for this presentation from the literature, and from our own experimental search engine testbed. Emphasis is on introducing the fundamental concepts, and the results of several performance analyses we conducted to compare different designs.