Efficient phrase querying with an auxiliary index

Abstract

Search engines need to evaluate queries extremely fast, a challenging task given the vast quantities of data being indexed. A significant proportion of the queries posed to search engines involve phrases. In this paper we consider how phrase queries can be efficiently supported with low disk overheads. Previous research has shown that phrase queries can be rapidly evaluated using nextword indexes, but these indexes are twice as large as conventional inverted files. We propose a combination of nextword indexes with inverted files as a solution to this problem. Our experiments show that combined use of an auxiliary nextword index and a conventional inverted file allow evaluation of phrase queries in half the time required to evaluate such queries with an inverted file alone, and the space overhead is only 10% of the size of the inverted file. Further time savings are available with only slight increases in disk requirements.