Skipblock: Self-Indexing For Block-Based Inverted List

In large web search engines the performance of Information Retrieval systems is a key issue. Block-based compression methods are often used to improve the search performance, but current self-indexing techniques are not adapted to such data structure and provide suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present Skip Block, a self-indexing model for block-based inverted lists. Based on a cost model, we show that it is possible to achieve significant improvements on both search performance and structure's space storage.