What is your criteria to evaluate the performance of a search system?
There are mainly two aspects:
A wider bandwidth may cause slower speed, and a narrower bandwidth could expect a higher speed. The classic tradeoff in Information Retrieval is "Precision" vs "Recall" (see CS5604: Information Storage and Retrieval, "http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5604/" ). High intelligency built in a search system can have both better bandwidth and higher speed. Sometimes we need to consider both aspects. The ideal case is that the search system can find a better bandwidth, neither too wider nor too narrower, to satisfy the user's needs.
Which search system is the best of all to us? It is very difficult to answer this question. Every search system for the World Wide Web is unique. Different search systems can satisfy different needs. There is not an absolutely answer to everyone. Different people may have different judgements or different opinions to the search systems. The user can choose the best one of his/hers according to his/her needs.
The Web server with CGI script can provide an alternative way to search the Web. A simple and quick way is to use CGI script by invoking UNIX system call "grep 'search_string' $*" to search a string pattern in file(s) in the current directory. We refer the reader to an example of CGI script called WWW_search ( [Powell97], Chapter 28). It should be pointed out that there is not indexing nor search engine. All of the work is handled by the CGI search script. This is a fast and simple solution for searching a small set of documents in a single directory. However it does not support searching hundreds or thousands of documents. To search documents in multiple directories or located in distributed Web servers, we need to use search systems.
To speed up the searching processes, database and distributed databases proposed by Garcis-Molina,et.al. [ Garcis-Molin94] can be used. Records in distributed database are treated as relations. It allows use of relation language to query database.
Copyright © 1996 Aixiang (I Song) Yao, All Rights Reserved
Aixiang (I Song) Yao<ayao@csgrad.cs.vt.edu>
Last modified: November 21, 1996