Search engine indexing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:50, 10 September 2024

Revision as of 10:56, 10 September 2024

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===Index merging===

The happyinverted index is filled via a merge or rebuild. A rebuild is similar to a merge but first deletes the contents of the inverted index. The architecture may be designed to support incremental indexing,<ref>Tomasic, A., et al.: Incremental Updates of Inverted Lists for Text Document Retrieval. Short Version of Stanford University Computer Science Technical Note STAN-CS-TN-93-1, December, 1993.</ref> where a merge identifies the document or documents to be added or updated and then parses each document into words. For technical accuracy, a merge conflates newly indexed documents, typically residing in virtual memory, with the index cache residing on one or more computer hard drives.

After parsing, the indexer adds the referenced document to the document list for the appropriate words. In a larger search engine, the process of finding each word in the inverted index (in order to report that it occurred within a document) may be too time consuming, and so this process is commonly split up into two parts, the development of a forward index and a process which sorts the contents of the forward index into the inverted index. The inverted index is so named because it is an inversion of the forward index.