Abstract Operating a network is a daunting task. Operating one at a global scale, with stringent service objectives and requirements to be available during maintenance and failures, is even more so. At Google, we operate such a network. This paper details our experience applying formal methods to some of the networking protocols that are developed and maintained by in-house engineers. These protocols centrally route network traffic to respond to changes in demand, react to network failures, and allow for maintenance and upgrades. We used formal methods to target a class of bugs stemming from unclear specifications, unintended system interactions, and logical errors at the specification level. We show how we modeled our protocols using an off-the-shelf model checker and a custom harness to scale the model horizontally. We were able to recreate several recent bugs and verify that the fixes implemented were correct. Finally, we present a method called state projection that we used to increase confidence in the coverage of our models, which we added to the TLC model checker for TLA+. We created 7 different TLA+ models and showed that they were effective at recreating bugs and verifying our fixes to those bugs.

Cloud and AI/ML workloads are posing unprecedented new requirements on the wide-area network: it must combine strict availability, massive growth, and feature agility. It became increasingly clear that traditional WAN designs were ill-equipped to adapt to these requirements.

The convergence behavior of many distributed machine learning (ML) algorithms can be sensitive to the number of machines being used or to changes in the computing environment. As a result, scaling to a large number of machines can be challenging. In this paper, we describe a new scalable coordinate descent (SCD) algorithm for generalized linear models whose convergence behavior is always the same, regardless of how much SCD is scaled out and regardless of the computing environment. This makes SCD highly robust and enables it to scale to massive datasets on low-cost commodity servers. Experimental results on a real advertising dataset in Google are used to demonstrate SCD's cost effectiveness and scalability. Using Google's internal cloud, we show that SCD can provide near linear scaling using thousands of cores for 1 trillion training examples on a petabyte of compressed data. This represents 10,000x more training examples than the 'large-scale' Netflix prize dataset. We also show that SCD can learn a model for 20 billion training examples in two hours for about $10.

Computer systems increasingly rely on heterogeneity to achieve greater performance, scalability and energy efficiency. Because heterogeneous systems typically comprise multiple execution contexts with different programming abstractions and runtimes, programming them remains extremely challenging.

Query rewriting algorithms can be used as a form of query expansion, by combining the user's original query with automatically generated rewrites. Rewriting algorithms bring linguistic datasets to bear without the need for iterative relevance feedback, but most studies of rewriting have used proprietary datasets such as large-scale search logs. By contrast this paper uses readily available data, particularly ClueWeb09 link text with over 1.2 billion anchor phrases, to generate rewrites. To avoid overfitting, our initial analysis is performed using Million Query Track queries, leading us to identify three algorithms which perform well. We then test the algorithms on Web and newswire data. Results show good properties in terms of robustness and early precision.

Many phenomena and artifacts such as road networks, social networks and the web can be modeled as large graphs and analyzed using graph algorithms. However, given the size of the underlying graphs, efficient implementation of basic operations such as connected component analysis, approximate shortest paths, and link-based ranking (e.g. PageRank) becomes challenging.

No abstract available.

Crawl selection policy has a direct influence on Web search effectiveness, because a useful page that is not selected for crawling will also be absent from search results. Yet there has been little or no work on measuring this effect. We introduce an evaluation framework, based on relevance judgments pooled from multiple search engines, measuring the maximum potential NDCG that is achievable using a particular crawl. This allows us to evaluate different crawl policies and investigate important scenarios like selection stability over multiple iterations. We conduct two sets of crawling experiments at the scale of 1~billion and 100~million pages respectively. These show that crawl selection based on PageRank, indegree and trans-domain indegree all allow better retrieval effectiveness than a simple breadth-first crawl of the same size. PageRank is the most reliable and effective method. Trans-domain indegree can outperform PageRank, but over multiple crawl iterations it is less effective and more unstable. Finally we experiment with combinations of crawl selection methods and per-domain page limits, which yield crawls with greater potential NDCG than PageRank.

Previous scalability experiments found that early precision improves as collection size increases. However, that was under the assumption that a collection's documents are all sampled with uniform probability from the same population. We contrast this to a large breadth-first web crawl, an important scenario in real-world Web search, where the early documents have quite different characteristics from the later documents.

Adversarial IR in general, and search engine spam, in particular, are engaging research topics with a real-world impact for Web users, advertisers and publishers. The AIRWeb workshop will bring researchers and practitioners in these areas together, to present and discuss state-of-the-art techniques as well as real-world experiences. Given the continued growth in search engine spam creation and detection efforts, we expect interest in this AIRWeb to surpass that of the previous three editions of the workshop (held jointly with WWW 2005, SIGIR 2006, and WWW 2007 respectively).

Dryad is a general-purpose distributed execution engine for coarse-grain data-parallel applications. A Dryad application combines computational "vertices" with communication "channels" to form a dataflow graph. Dryad runs the application by executing the vertices of this graph on a set of available computers, communicating as appropriate through flies, TCP pipes, and shared-memory FIFOs.

In this paper, we continue our investigations of "web spam": the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines, to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit. This paper considers some previously-undescribed techniques for automatically detecting spam pages, examines the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and when aggregated using classification algorithms. When combined, our heuristics correctly identify 2,037 (86.2%) of the 2,364 spam pages (13.8%) in our judged collection of 17,168 pages, while misidentifying 526 spam and non-spam pages (3.1%).

Two years ago, we conducted a study on the evolution of web pages over time. In the course of that study, we discovered a large number of machine-generated "spam" web pages emanating from a handful of web servers in Germany. These spam web pages were dynamically assembled by stitching together grammatically well-formed German sentences drawn from a large collection of sentences. This discovery motivated us to develop techniques for finding other instances of such "slice and dice" generation of web pages, where pages are automatically generated by stitching together phrases drawn from a limited corpus. We applied these techniques to two data sets, a set of 151 million web pages collected in December 2002 and a set of 96 million web pages collected in June 2004. We found a number of other instances of large-scale phrase-level replication within the two data sets. This paper describes the algorithms we used to discover this type of replication, and highlights the results of our data mining.

The increasing importance of search engines to commercial web sites has given rise to a phenomenon we call "web spam", that is, web pages that exist only to mislead search engines into (mis)leading users to certain web sites. Web spam is a nuisance to users as well as search engines: users have a harder time finding the information they need, and search engines have to cope with an inflated corpus, which in turn causes their cost per query to increase. Therefore, search engines have a strong incentive to weed out spam web pages from their index.We propose that some spam web pages can be identified through statistical analysis: Certain classes of spam pages, in particular those that are machine-generated, diverge in some of their properties from the properties of web pages at large. We have examined a variety of such properties, including linkage structure, page content, and page evolution, and have found that outliers in the statistical distribution of these properties are highly likely to be caused by web spam.This paper describes the properties we have examined, gives the statistical distributions we have observed, and shows which kinds of outliers are highly correlated with web spam.

Abstract How fast does the Web change? Does most of the content remain unchanged once it has been authored, or are the documents continuously updated? Do pages change a little or a lot? Is the extent of change correlated to any other property of the page? All of these questions are of interest to those who mine the Web, including all the popular search engines, but few studies have been performed to date to answer them. One notable exception is a study by Cho and Garcia‐Molina, who crawled a set of 720 000 pages on a daily basis over 4 months, and counted pages as having changed if their MD5 checksum changed. They found that 40% of all Web pages in their set changed within a week, and 23% of those pages that fell into the .com domain changed daily. This paper expands on Cho and Garcia‐Molina's study, both in terms of coverage and in terms of sensitivity to change. We crawled a set of 150 836 209 HTML pages once every week, over a span of 11 weeks. For each page, we recorded a checksum of the page, and a feature vector of the words on the page, plus various other data such as the page length, the HTTP status code, etc. Moreover, we pseudo‐randomly selected 0.1% of all of our URLs, and saved the full text of each download of the corresponding pages. After completion of the crawl, we analyzed the degree of change of each page, and investigated which factors are correlated with change intensity. We found that the average degree of change varies widely across top‐level domains, and that larger pages change more often and more severely than smaller ones. This paper describes the crawl and the data transformations we performed on the logs, and presents some statistical observations on the degree of change of different classes of pages. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How fast does the web change? Does most of the content remain unchanged once it has been authored, or are the documents continuously updated? Do pages change a little or a lot? Is the extent of change correlated to any other property of the page? All of these questions are of interest to those who mine the web, including all the popular search engines, but few studies have been performed to date to answer them.One notable exception is a study by Cho and Garcia-Molina, who crawled a set of 720,000 pages on a daily basis over four months, and counted pages as having changed if their MD5 checksum changed. They found that 40% of all web pages in their set changed within a week, and 23% of those pages that fell into the .com domain changed daily.This paper expands on Cho and Garcia-Molina's study, both in terms of coverage and in terms of sensitivity to change. We crawled a set of 150,836,209 HTML pages once every week, over a span of 11 weeks. For each page, we recorded a checksum of the page, and a feature vector of the words on the page, plus various other data such as the page length, the HTTP status code, etc. Moreover, we pseudo-randomly selected 0.1% of all of our URLs, and saved the full text of each download of the corresponding pages.After completion of the crawl, we analyzed the degree of change of each page, and investigated which factors are correlated with change intensity. We found that the average degree of change varies widely across top-level domains, and that larger pages change more often and more severely than smaller ones.This paper describes the crawl and the data transformations we performed on the logs, and presents some statistical observations on the degree of change of different classes of pages.