Project topics for CS490 (Fall 2010)

1) Cache freshness issues for Web search engines:

Description: Web search engines typically involve a result cache (i.e., the output Web page with top-10 results) for frequently and/or recently asked queries. A currently hot topic in management of a result cache is monitoring the freshness of the results stored in the cache, and removing expired answers.

In this project, the goal is implementing the system proposed in a very recent work [1] on top of the experimental framework developed in our research group and trying to extend the approach described in that work.

1. Blanco et al., Caching Search Engine Results over Incremental Indices, SIGIR 2010. A related poster paper is available at http://research.yahoo.com/files/rtcaching.pdf

2) Improving search engine availability:

Description: This project aims to find some solutions to improve the availability of a search engine when the system is down due to some problem.