Impact of regionalization on performance of web search engine result caches

Abstract

Large-scale web search engines are known to maintain caches that store the results of previously issued queries. They are also known to customize their search results in different forms to improve the relevance of their results to a particular group of users. In this paper, we show that the regionalization of search results decreases the hit rates attained by a result cache. As a remedy, we investigate result prefetching strategies that aim to recover the hit rate sacrificed to search result regionalization. Our results indicate that prefetching achieves a reasonable increase in the result cache hit rate under regionalization of search results. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.