• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
• /
• v.14 no.4
• /
• pp.412-429
• /
• 2008

As the amount of electronic documents increases rapidly with the growth of the Internet, a parallel search engine capable of handling a large number of documents are becoming ever important. To implement a parallel search engine, we need to partition the inverted index and search through the partitioned index in parallel. There are two methods of partitioning the inverted index: 1) document-identifier based partitioning and 2) keyword-identifier based partitioning. However, each method alone has the following drawbacks. The former is convenient in inserting documents and has high throughput, but has poor performance for top h query processing. The latter has good performance for top-k query processing, but is inconvenient in inserting documents and has low throughput. In this paper, we propose a hybrid partitioning method to compensate for the drawback of each method. We design and implement a parallel search engine that supports the hybrid partitioning method using the Odysseus DBMS tightly coupled with information retrieval capability. We first introduce the architecture of the parallel search engine-Odysseus/parallel-OOSQL. We then show the effectiveness of the proposed system through systematic experiments. The experimental results show that the query processing time of the document-identifier based partitioning method is approximately inversely proportional to the number of blocks in the partition of the inverted index. The results also show that the keyword-identifier based partitioning method has good performance in top-k query processing. The proposed parallel search engine can be optimized for performance by customizing the methods of partitioning the inverted index according to the application environment. The Odysseus/parallel OOSQL parallel search engine is capable of indexing, storing, and querying 100 million web documents per node or tens of billions of web documents for the entire system.