The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Abstract
In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy
use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently
and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full
text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/
To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of
millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of
millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web,
very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in
technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three
years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the
first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling
traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved
with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This
paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the
additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal
with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.
use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently
and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full
text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/
To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of
millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of
millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web,
very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in
technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three
years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the
first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling
traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved
with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This
paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the
additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal
with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.
Research Areas
