- •List of Tables
- •List of Figures
- •Table of Notation
- •Preface
- •Boolean retrieval
- •An example information retrieval problem
- •Processing Boolean queries
- •The extended Boolean model versus ranked retrieval
- •References and further reading
- •The term vocabulary and postings lists
- •Document delineation and character sequence decoding
- •Obtaining the character sequence in a document
- •Choosing a document unit
- •Determining the vocabulary of terms
- •Tokenization
- •Dropping common terms: stop words
- •Normalization (equivalence classing of terms)
- •Stemming and lemmatization
- •Faster postings list intersection via skip pointers
- •Positional postings and phrase queries
- •Biword indexes
- •Positional indexes
- •Combination schemes
- •References and further reading
- •Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval
- •Search structures for dictionaries
- •Wildcard queries
- •General wildcard queries
- •Spelling correction
- •Implementing spelling correction
- •Forms of spelling correction
- •Edit distance
- •Context sensitive spelling correction
- •Phonetic correction
- •References and further reading
- •Index construction
- •Hardware basics
- •Blocked sort-based indexing
- •Single-pass in-memory indexing
- •Distributed indexing
- •Dynamic indexing
- •Other types of indexes
- •References and further reading
- •Index compression
- •Statistical properties of terms in information retrieval
- •Dictionary compression
- •Dictionary as a string
- •Blocked storage
- •Variable byte codes
- •References and further reading
- •Scoring, term weighting and the vector space model
- •Parametric and zone indexes
- •Weighted zone scoring
- •Learning weights
- •The optimal weight g
- •Term frequency and weighting
- •Inverse document frequency
- •The vector space model for scoring
- •Dot products
- •Queries as vectors
- •Computing vector scores
- •Sublinear tf scaling
- •Maximum tf normalization
- •Document and query weighting schemes
- •Pivoted normalized document length
- •References and further reading
- •Computing scores in a complete search system
- •Index elimination
- •Champion lists
- •Static quality scores and ordering
- •Impact ordering
- •Cluster pruning
- •Components of an information retrieval system
- •Tiered indexes
- •Designing parsing and scoring functions
- •Putting it all together
- •Vector space scoring and query operator interaction
- •References and further reading
- •Evaluation in information retrieval
- •Information retrieval system evaluation
- •Standard test collections
- •Evaluation of unranked retrieval sets
- •Evaluation of ranked retrieval results
- •Assessing relevance
- •A broader perspective: System quality and user utility
- •System issues
- •User utility
- •Results snippets
- •References and further reading
- •Relevance feedback and query expansion
- •Relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback
- •The Rocchio algorithm for relevance feedback
- •Probabilistic relevance feedback
- •When does relevance feedback work?
- •Relevance feedback on the web
- •Evaluation of relevance feedback strategies
- •Pseudo relevance feedback
- •Indirect relevance feedback
- •Summary
- •Global methods for query reformulation
- •Vocabulary tools for query reformulation
- •Query expansion
- •Automatic thesaurus generation
- •References and further reading
- •XML retrieval
- •Basic XML concepts
- •Challenges in XML retrieval
- •A vector space model for XML retrieval
- •Evaluation of XML retrieval
- •References and further reading
- •Exercises
- •Probabilistic information retrieval
- •Review of basic probability theory
- •The Probability Ranking Principle
- •The 1/0 loss case
- •The PRP with retrieval costs
- •The Binary Independence Model
- •Deriving a ranking function for query terms
- •Probability estimates in theory
- •Probability estimates in practice
- •Probabilistic approaches to relevance feedback
- •An appraisal and some extensions
- •An appraisal of probabilistic models
- •Bayesian network approaches to IR
- •References and further reading
- •Language models for information retrieval
- •Language models
- •Finite automata and language models
- •Types of language models
- •Multinomial distributions over words
- •The query likelihood model
- •Using query likelihood language models in IR
- •Estimating the query generation probability
- •Language modeling versus other approaches in IR
- •Extended language modeling approaches
- •References and further reading
- •Relation to multinomial unigram language model
- •The Bernoulli model
- •Properties of Naive Bayes
- •A variant of the multinomial model
- •Feature selection
- •Mutual information
- •Comparison of feature selection methods
- •References and further reading
- •Document representations and measures of relatedness in vector spaces
- •k nearest neighbor
- •Time complexity and optimality of kNN
- •The bias-variance tradeoff
- •References and further reading
- •Exercises
- •Support vector machines and machine learning on documents
- •Support vector machines: The linearly separable case
- •Extensions to the SVM model
- •Multiclass SVMs
- •Nonlinear SVMs
- •Experimental results
- •Machine learning methods in ad hoc information retrieval
- •Result ranking by machine learning
- •References and further reading
- •Flat clustering
- •Clustering in information retrieval
- •Problem statement
- •Evaluation of clustering
- •Cluster cardinality in K-means
- •Model-based clustering
- •References and further reading
- •Exercises
- •Hierarchical clustering
- •Hierarchical agglomerative clustering
- •Time complexity of HAC
- •Group-average agglomerative clustering
- •Centroid clustering
- •Optimality of HAC
- •Divisive clustering
- •Cluster labeling
- •Implementation notes
- •References and further reading
- •Exercises
- •Matrix decompositions and latent semantic indexing
- •Linear algebra review
- •Matrix decompositions
- •Term-document matrices and singular value decompositions
- •Low-rank approximations
- •Latent semantic indexing
- •References and further reading
- •Web search basics
- •Background and history
- •Web characteristics
- •The web graph
- •Spam
- •Advertising as the economic model
- •The search user experience
- •User query needs
- •Index size and estimation
- •Near-duplicates and shingling
- •References and further reading
- •Web crawling and indexes
- •Overview
- •Crawling
- •Crawler architecture
- •DNS resolution
- •The URL frontier
- •Distributing indexes
- •Connectivity servers
- •References and further reading
- •Link analysis
- •The Web as a graph
- •Anchor text and the web graph
- •PageRank
- •Markov chains
- •The PageRank computation
- •Hubs and Authorities
- •Choosing the subset of the Web
- •References and further reading
- •Bibliography
- •Author Index
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20 Web crawling and indexes
20.1Overview
WEB CRAWLER SPIDER
Web crawling is the process by which we gather pages from the Web, in order to index them and support a search engine. The objective of crawling is to quickly and efficiently gather as many useful web pages as possible, together with the link structure that interconnects them. In Chapter 19 we studied the complexities of the Web stemming from its creation by millions of uncoordinated individuals. In this chapter we study the resulting difficulties for crawling the Web. The focus of this chapter is the component shown in Figure 19.7 as web crawler; it is sometimes referred to as a spider.
The goal of this chapter is not to describe how to build the crawler for a full-scale commercial web search engine. We focus instead on a range of issues that are generic to crawling from the student project scale to substantial research projects. We begin (Section 20.1.1) by listing desiderata for web crawlers, and then discuss in Section 20.2 how each of these issues is addressed. The remainder of this chapter describes the architecture and some implementation details for a distributed web crawler that satisfies these features. Section 20.3 discusses distributing indexes across many machines for
a web-scale implementation.
20.1.1Features a crawler must provide
We list the desiderata for web crawlers in two categories: features that web crawlers must provide, followed by features they should provide.
Robustness: The Web contains servers that create spider traps, which are generators of web pages that mislead crawlers into getting stuck fetching an infinite number of pages in a particular domain. Crawlers must be designed to be resilient to such traps. Not all such traps are malicious; some are the inadvertent side-effect of faulty website development.
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