WWW 2010 • Poster April 26-30 • Raleigh • NC • USA Caching Search Engine Results over Incremental Indices

A Web search engine must update its index periodically to incorporate changes to the Web, and we argue in this work that index updates fundamentally impact the design of search engine result caches. Index updates lead to the problem of cache invalidation: invalidating cached entries of queries whose results have changed. To enable efficient invalidation of cached results, we propose a framework for developing invalidation predictors and some concrete predictors. Evaluation using Wikipedia documents and a query log from Yahoo! shows that selective invalidation of cached search results can lower the number of query re-evaluations by as much as 30% compared to a baseline time-to-live scheme, while returning results of similar freshness.