Current search engines use very complex ranking functions based on hundreds of features. While such functions return high-quality results, they create efficiency challenges as it is too costly to fully evaluate them on all documents in the union, or even intersection, of the query terms. To address this issue, search engines use a series of cascading rankers, starting with a very simple ranking function and then applying increasingly complex and expensive ranking functions on smaller and smaller sets of candidate results. Researchers have recently started studying several problems within this framework of query processing by cascading rankers; see, e.g., [5, 13, 17, 51].

A large amount of research has focused on faster methods for finding top-k results in large document collections, one of the main scalability challenges for web search engines. In this paper, we propose a method for accelerating such top-k queries that builds on and generalizes methods recently proposed by several groups of researchers based on Block-Max Indexes. In particular, we describe a system that uses a new filtering mechanism, based on a combination of block maxima and bitmaps, that radically reduces the number of documents that have to be further evaluated. Our filtering mechanism exploits the SIMD processing capabilities of current microprocessors, and it is optimized through caching policies that select and store suitable filter structures based on properties of the query load. Our experimental evaluation shows that the mechanism results in very significant speed-ups for disjunctive top-k queries under several state-of-the-art algorithms, including a speed-up of more than a factor of 2 over the fastest previously known methods.

Large web search engines use significant hardware and energy resources to process hundreds of millions of queries each day, and a lot of research has focused on how to improve query processing efficiency. One general class of optimizations called early termination techniques is used in all major engines, and essentially involves computing top results without an exhaustive traversal and scoring of all potentially relevant index entries. Recent work in [9,7] proposed several early termination algorithms for disjunctive top-k query processing, based on a new augmented index structure called Block-Max Index that enables aggressive skipping in the index.

Many web search services allow users to constrain text queries to a geographic location (e.g., yoga classes near Santa Monica). Important examples include local search engines such as Google Local and location-based search services for smart phones. Several research groups have studied the efficient execution of queries mixing text and geography; their approaches usually combine inverted lists with a spatial access method such as an R-tree or space-filling curve. In this paper, we take a fresh look at this problem. We feel that previous work has often focused on the spatial aspect at the expense of performance considerations in text processing, such as inverted index access, compression, and caching. We describe new and existing approaches and discuss their different perspectives. We then compare their performance in extensive experiments on large document collections. Our results indicate that a query processor that combines state-of-the-art text processing techniques with a simple coarse-grained spatial structure can outperform existing approaches by up to two orders of magnitude. In fact, even a naive approach that first uses a simple inverted index and then filters out any documents outside the query range outperforms many previous methods.