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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 3501–3506Cite as

Web Search Result Caching and Prefetching

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Synonyms

Search engine caching and prefetching; Search engine query result caching; Paging in Web search engines

Definition

Caching is a well-known concept in systems with multiple tiers of storage. For simplicity, consider a system storing N objects in relatively slow memory, that also has a smaller but faster memory buffer of capacity k which can store copies of k of the N objects (N >> k). This fast memory buffer is called the cache. The storage system is presented with a continuous stream of queries, each requesting one of the N objects. If the object is stored in the cache, a cache hit occurs and the object is quickly retrieved. Otherwise, a cache miss occurs, and the object is retrieved from the slower memory. At this point, the storage system can opt to save the newly retrieved object in the cache. When the cache is full (i.e., already contains k objects), this entails evicting some currently cached object. Such decisions are handled by a replacement policy, whose goal is to...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo! Research, Haifa, Israel

    Ronny Lempel

  2. ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Fabrizio Silvestri

Authors
  1. Ronny Lempel
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  2. Fabrizio Silvestri
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Professor, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU

  2. Professor and Director, University Research Chair, Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Lempel, R., Silvestri, F. (2009). Web Search Result Caching and Prefetching. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_464

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