Web search engines
Rooted in Information Retrieval (IR) systems
•Prepare a keyword index for corpus
•Respond to keyword queries with a ranked list of
documents.
ARCHIE
•Earliest application of rudimentary IR systems to
the Internet
•Title search across sites serving files over FTP
Boolean queries: Examples
 Simple queries involving relationships
between terms and documents
• Documents containing the word Java
• Documents containing the word Java but not
the word coffee
 Proximity queries
• Documents containing the phrase Java beans
•
or the term API
Documents where Java and island occur in
the same sentence
Mining the Web
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Document preprocessing
 Tokenization
• Filtering away tags
• Tokens regarded as nonempty sequence of
•
•
•
characters excluding spaces and
punctuations.
Token represented by a suitable integer, tid,
typically 32 bits
Optional: stemming/conflation of words
Result: document (did) transformed into a
sequence of integers (tid, pos)
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Storing tokens
 Straight-forward implementation using a
relational database
• Example figure
• Space scales to almost 10 times
 Accesses to table show common pattern
• reduce the storage by mapping tids to a
•
lexicographically sorted buffer of (did, pos)
tuples.
Indexing = transposing document-term matrix
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Two variants of the inverted index data structure, usually stored on disk. The simpler
version in the middle does not store term offset information; the version to the right stores
term
offsets. The mapping from terms to documents and positions (written as
“document/position”) may
be implemented using a B-tree or a hash-table.
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Storage
 For dynamic corpora
• Berkeley DB2 storage manager
• Can frequently add, modify and delete
documents
 For static collections
• Index compression techniques (to be
discussed)
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Stopwords
 Function words and connectives
 Appear in large number of documents and little
use in pinpointing documents
 Indexing stopwords
• Stopwords not indexed

For reducing index space and improving performance
• Replace stopwords with a placeholder (to remember
the offset)
 Issues
• Queries containing only stopwords ruled out
• Polysemous words that are stopwords in one sense
but not in others

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E.g.; can as a verb vs. can as a noun
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Stemming
 Conflating words to help match a query term with a
morphological variant in the corpus.
 Remove inflections that convey parts of speech, tense
and number
 E.g.: university and universal both stem to universe.
 Techniques
• morphological analysis (e.g., Porter's algorithm)
• dictionary lookup (e.g., WordNet).
 Stemming may increase recall but at the price of
precision
• Abbreviations, polysemy and names coined in the technical and
commercial sectors
• E.g.: Stemming “ides” to “IDE”, “SOCKS” to “sock”, “gated” to
“gate”, may be bad !
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Batch indexing and updates
 Incremental indexing
• Time-consuming due to random disk IO
• High level of disk block fragmentation
 Simple sort-merges.
• To replace the indexed update of variablelength postings
 For a dynamic collection
• single document-level change may need to
update hundreds to thousands of records.
• Solution : create an additional “stop-press”
index.
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Maintaining indices over dynamic collections.
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Stop-press index
 Collection of document in flux
• Model document modification as deletion followed by insertion
• Documents in flux represented by a signed record (d,t,s)
• “s” specifies if “d” has been deleted or inserted.
 Getting the final answer to a query
• Main index returns a document set D0.
• Stop-press index returns two document sets
D+ : documents not yet indexed in D0 matching the query
 D- : documents matching the query removed from the collection
since D0 was constructed.

 Stop-press index getting too large
• Rebuild the main index
signed (d, t, s) records are sorted in (t, d, s) order and mergepurged into the master (t, d) records
• Stop-press index can be emptied out.

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Relevance ranking
 Keyword queries
• In natural language
• Not precise, unlike SQL

Boolean decision for response unacceptable
• Solution



Rate each document for how likely it is to satisfy the user's
information need
Sort in decreasing order of the score
Present results in a ranked list.
 No algorithmic way of ensuring that the ranking
strategy always favors the information need
• Query: only a part of the user's information need
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Responding to queries
 Set-valued response
• Response set may be very large
 (E.g.,
by recent estimates, over 12 million Web
pages contain the word java.)
 Demanding selective query from user
 Guessing user's information need and
ranking responses
 Evaluating rankings
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Evaluating procedure
 Given benchmark
• Corpus of n documents D
• A set of queries Q
• For each query, q  Q an exhaustive set of
relevant documents D q  D identified
manually
 Query submitted system
• Ranked list of documents
•
(d1 , d 2 ,, d n )
retrieved (r1, r2 , .., rn )
compute a 0/1 relevance list
ri  1 iff d i  D q
Mining the Web
 ri  0 otherwise.Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan

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Recall and precision
 Recall at rank
• Fraction of all relevant documents included in
•
. (d1 , d 2 ,, d n )
1
.
recall(k) 
| Dq |
r
1i  k
i
 Precision at rank k  1
• Fraction of the top k responses that are
•
actually relevant.
. precision( k)  1
r
k
Mining the Web

1i  k
i
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Other measures
 Average precision
• Sum of precision at each relevant hit position in the
response list, divided by the total number of relevant
documents
• . avg.precis ion  1  rk * precision (k )
| Dq | 1k |D|
.
• avg.precision =1 iff engine retrieves all relevant
documents and ranks them ahead of any irrelevant
document
 Interpolated precision
• To combine precision values from multiple queries
• Gives precision-vs.-recall curve for the benchmark.


Mining the Web
For each query, take the maximum precision obtained for the
query for any recall greater than or equal to 
average them together for all queries
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Precision-Recall tradeoff
 Interpolated precision cannot increase with
recall
• Interpolated precision at recall level 0 may be less
than 1
 At level k = 0
• Precision (by convention) = 1, Recall = 0
 Inspecting more documents
• Can increase recall
• Precision may decrease

we will start encountering more and more irrelevant
documents
 Search engine with a good ranking function will
generally show a negative relation between
recall and precision.
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the Web
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Higher the curve,Chakrabarti
betterandthe
engine
Precision and interpolated precision plotted against recall for
the given relevance vector. Missing rk are zeroes.
Mining the Web
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The vector space model
 Documents represented as vectors in a
multi-dimensional Euclidean space
• Each axis = a term (token)
 Coordinate of document d in direction of
term t determined by:
• Term frequency TF(d,t)
 number
of times term t occurs in document d,
scaled in a variety of ways to normalize document
length
• Inverse document frequency IDF(t)
 to
scale down the coordinates of terms that occur
Mining the Web in many documents
Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan
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Term frequency
n(d, t)
 . TF(d, t)  n(d, t)
TF(d, t) 
n(d,  )
max (n(d,  ))


.

 Cornell SMART system uses a smoothed
version
TF (d , t )  0
TF (d , t )  1  log( 1  n(d , t ))
Mining the Web
n(d , t )  0
otherwise
Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan
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Inverse document frequency
 Given
• D is the document collection and Dt is the set
of documents containing t
 Formulae
• mostly dampened functions of
• SMART
.
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D
| Dt |
1 | D |
IDF (t )  log(
)
| Dt |
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Vector space model
 Coordinate of document d in axis t
• . dt  TF (d , t ) IDF (t ) 
• Transformed to d in the TFIDF-space
 Query q
• Interpreted as a document
• Transformed to q in the same TFIDF-space
as d
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Measures of proximity
 Distance measure
• Magnitude
of the vector difference
 
. | d q |
• Document vectors must be normalized to unit
length
 Else
shorter documents dominate (since queries
are short)
 Cosine similarity
• cosine of the angle between
 Shorter
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
d
and

q
documents are penalized
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Relevance feedback
 Users learning how to modify queries
• Response list must have least some relevant
documents
• Relevance feedback


`correcting' the ranks to the user's taste
automates the query refinement process
 Rocchio's method
• Folding-in user feedback

q
• To query vector


• .
Add a weighted sum of vectors for relevant documents D+
Subtract a weighted sum of the irrelevant documents D-




q'   q    d -   d
D
Mining the Web
D-
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Relevance feedback (contd.)
 Pseudo-relevance feedback
• D+ and D- generated automatically
 E.g.:
Cornell SMART system
 top 10 documents reported by the first round of
query execution are included in D+
•  typically set to 0; D- not used
 Not a commonly available feature
• Web users want instant gratification
• System complexity
 Executing
the second round query slower and
expensive for major search engines
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Bayesian Inferencing
Bayesian inference network for relevance ranking. A
document is relevant to the extent that setting its
corresponding belief node to true lets us assign a high
degree of belief in the node corresponding to the query.
Mining the Web
Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan
Manual specification of
mappings between terms
to approximate concepts.
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Bayesian Inferencing (contd.)
 Four layers
1.Document layer
2.Representation layer
3.Query concept layer
4.Query
 Each node is associated with a random
Boolean variable, reflecting belief
 Directed arcs signify that the belief of a
node is a function of the belief of its
immediate parents (and so on..)
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Bayesian Inferencing systems
 2 & 3 same for basic vector-space IR
systems
 Verity's Search97
• Allows administrators and users to define
hierarchies of concepts in files
 Estimation of relevance of a document d
w.r.t. the query q
• Set the belief of the corresponding node to 1
• Set all other document beliefs to 0
• Compute the belief of the query
• Rank documents in decreasing order of belief
that they induce
in the query
Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan
Mining the Web
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Other issues
 Spamming
• Adding popular query terms to a page unrelated to
those terms
• E.g.: Adding “Hawaii vacation rental” to a page about
“Internet gambling”
• Little setback due to hyperlink-based ranking
 Titles, headings, meta tags and anchor-text
• TFIDF framework treats all terms the same
• Meta search engines:

Assign weight age to text occurring in tags, meta-tags
• Using anchor-text on pages u which link to v

Mining the Web
Anchor-text on u offers valuable editorial judgment about v as
well.
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Other issues (contd..)
 Including phrases to rank complex queries
• Operators to specify word inclusions and
•
exclusions
With operators and phrases
queries/documents can no longer be treated
as ordinary points in vector space
 Dictionary of phrases
• Could be cataloged manually
• Could be derived from the corpus itself using
•
statistical techniques
Two separate indices:
 one
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for single terms and another for phrases
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Corpus derived phrase dictionary
t
t
 Two terms 1and 2
 Null hypothesis = occurrences
of 1and 2are independent
 To the extent the pair violates
the null hypothesis, it is likely
to be a phrase
t
t
• Measuring violation
with likelihood ratio of
the hypothesis
• Pick phrases that
violate the null
hypothesis with large
confidence
 Contingency table built from
statistics
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k00  k (t1 , t 2 ) k01  k (t1 , t 2 )
k10  k (t1 , t 2 ) k11  k (t1 , t 2 )
Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan
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Corpus derived phrase dictionary
 Hypotheses
• Null hypothesis
k 00 k 01 k10 k11
H ( p00 , p01, p10 , p11; k00 , k01, k10 , k11 )  p00
p01 p10 p11
• Alternative hypothesis
H ( p1 , p2 ; k00 , k01, k10 , k11 )  ((1  p1 )(1  p2 )) k00 ((1  p1 ) p2 ) k01 ( p1 (1  p2 )) k10 ( p1 p2 ) k11
• Likelihood ratio

max H ( p; k )
p 0
max H ( p; k )
p
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Approximate string matching

Non-uniformity of word spellings
• dialects of English
• transliteration from other languages
 Two ways to reduce this problem.
1. Aggressive conflation mechanism to
2.
collapse variant spellings into the same
token
Decompose terms into a sequence of qgrams or sequences of q characters
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Approximate string matching
1. Aggressive conflation mechanism to collapse
variant spellings into the same token
•
•
E.g.: Soundex : takes phonetics and pronunciation details
into account
used with great success in indexing and searching last
names in census and telephone directory data.
2. Decompose terms into a sequence of q-grams
or sequences of q characters
•
•
Check for similarity in the q(2  q  4)
grams
Looking up the inverted index : a two-stage affair:
•
•
•
•
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Smaller index of q-grams consulted to expand each query
term into a set of slightly distorted query terms
These terms are submitted to the regular index
Used by Google for spelling correction
Idea also adopted for eliminating near-duplicate pages
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Meta-search systems
• Take the search engine to the document
• Forward queries to many geographically distributed
repositories
•
Each has its own search service
• Consolidate their responses.
• Advantages
• Perform non-trivial query rewriting
•
Suit a single user query to many search engines with
different query syntax
• Surprisingly small overlap between crawls
• Consolidating responses
• Function goes beyond just eliminating duplicates
• Search services do not provide standard ranks which
can be combined meaningfully
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Similarity search
• Cluster hypothesis
• Documents similar to relevant documents are
also likely to be relevant
• Handling “find similar” queries
• Replication or duplication of pages
• Mirroring of sites
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Document similarity
• Jaccard coefficient of similarity between
document d1 and d 2
• T(d) = set of tokens in document d
| T (d )  T (d ) |
r
'
(
d
,
d
)

•.
| T (d )  T (d ) |
• Symmetric, reflexive, not a metric
• Forgives any number of occurrences and any
1
1
2
1
2
2
permutations of the terms.
• 1  r ' (d1, d2 )
Mining the Web
is a metric
Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan
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Estimating Jaccard coefficient with
random permutations
1. Generate a set of m random
permutations
2. for each  do
3.
compute (d1 ) and (d2 )
4.
check if min T (d1 )  min T (d2 )
5. end for
6. if equality was observed in k cases,
estimate. r ' (d1 , d 2 )  k

m
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Fast similarity search with random
permutations
1. for each random permutation
do

2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
create a filef 
for each document d do
write out  s  min (T (d )), d 
tof 
end for
sort f  using key s--this results in contiguous blocks with fixed
ds
s containing all associated
create a fileg 
f
for each pair(d1 , d 2 )
within a run of
having a given s do
7.
8.
(d1 , d 2 )
9.
write out a document-pair record
to g
10.
end for
11.
sort g  on key(d1 , d 2 )
12. end for
(d1of
, d2 )
13. merge g  for all in(d1 , d 2 )
order, counting the number
entries
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Eliminating near-duplicates via shingling
• “Find-similar” algorithm reports all duplicate/nearduplicate pages
• Eliminating duplicates
• Maintain a checksum with every page in the corpus
• Eliminating near-duplicates
• Represent each document as a set T(d) of q-grams (shingles)
• Find Jaccard similarity r (d1 , d2 ) between d1 and d 2
• Eliminate the pair from step 9 if it has similarity above a
threshold
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•
Detecting locally similar sub-graphs of the
Web
Similarity search and duplicate elimination on the
graph structure of the web
•
•
To improve quality of hyperlink-assisted ranking
Detecting mirrored sites
•
Approach 1 [Bottom-up Approach]
1.
Start process with textual duplicate detection
•
•
•
2.
3.
•
cleaned URLs are listed and sorted to find duplicates/nearduplicates
each set of equivalent URLs is assigned a unique token ID
each page is stripped of all text, and represented as a sequence
of outlink IDs
Continue using link sequence representation
Until no further collapse of multiple URLs are possible
Approach 2 [Bottom-up Approach]
1.
2.
3.
Mining the Web
identify single nodes which are near duplicates (using textshingling)
extend single-node mirrors to two-node mirrors
continue on to larger and larger graphs which are likely mirrors of
Chakrabarti and Ramakrishnan
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one another
Detecting mirrored sites (contd.)
• Approach 3 [Step before fetching all pages]
•
Uses regularity in URL strings to identify host-pairs which are
mirrors
• Preprocessing
• Host are represented as sets of positional bigrams
• Convert host and path to all lowercase characters
• Let any punctuation or digit sequence be a token separator
• Tokenize the URL into a sequence of tokens, (e.g.,
www6.infoseek.com gives www, infoseek, com)
• Eliminate stop terms such as htm, html, txt, main, index, home,
bin, cgi
• Form positional bigrams from the token sequence
•
Two hosts are said to be mirrors if
• A large fraction of paths are valid on both web sites
• These common paths link to pages that are near-duplicates.
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