Category Index Augmentation for Web Search Efficiency
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current search engines face challenges in quickly providing users with relevant information from the vast World-Wide Web due to their reliance on centralized indexing and crawling methods, which are inefficient in handling the enormous scale of web content, leading to delayed user access to desired pages.
Innovation Solution
An electronic document retrieval system that utilizes category indices generated by webmasters to associate keywords with category-heading documents, allowing global search engines to identify relevant category-heading documents alongside search results, enabling users to access relevant information more quickly by combining domain-specific expertise with global search capabilities.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If search engines use centralized indexing and crawling methods to handle web content, then they can maintain a comprehensive index of web pages, but the system complexity and time required to provide search results increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the centralized search system into distributed components: local search engines at individual organizations and a global search engine. Each local search engine maintains its own index independently, eliminating the need for a single comprehensive centralized index while reducing system complexity and improving reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a hierarchical dimension to the search architecture, with local search engines operating at the organizational level and a global search engine operating at the internet level. This multi-level structure allows comprehensive coverage without requiring a single complex centralized system.
2Reliability
If search engines rely on centralized crawling to index all web pages, then they can provide comprehensive search coverage, but the time required to crawl and index new content increases
Solution Approach 1:
Local search engines perform preliminary indexing of their organization's web content in advance, maintaining ready-to-use local indexes. This eliminates the need for real-time centralized crawling when users search, as results can be immediately retrieved from pre-indexed local content.
Solution Approach 2:
Each organization's local search engine independently maintains and updates its own index without requiring centralized crawling resources. This self-service approach allows parallel indexing across multiple organizations, dramatically reducing the time required to incorporate new web content into the search system.
3Measurement precision
If search engines provide detailed search results from multiple sources, then users can find relevant information more accurately, but the amount of information presented to users increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent provides different types of search results with different levels of detail based on their source and relevance. Local search results from the user's organization are presented with full detail and context, while global search results are presented with summarized information. This allows accurate search results without overwhelming users with excessive information from all sources equally.
Data Source
AI summary
An electronic document retrieval system is disclosed. It has particular utility to World-Wide Web searching. The system requires webmasters to put forward categories into which the pages on their web-site might sensibly be divided, and to provide a list of those categories together with a list of popular keywords associated with those categories to a global search engine. The global search engine is then able to augment one or more of its search results with links to category-heading pages which most closely relate to the query provided by the user. In this way, a user is able to find the page most relevant to his query more rapidly than has hitherto been possible.