A switching proxy for web search engines

Retrieving desired information on the web is one of the most important activities while surfing the web. Search engines have become the most effective tool achieve this goal. An uncountable numbers of query requests are generated to every web search engine day by day. Of course, it is impossible to handle all these voluminous query requests within a single machine. Such problem is handled in general by duplicating the search service in many servers and putting a layer-4 switching device as the entry point of the duplicated query processing servers. The workload of query requests is therefore distributed to the duplicated query processing servers. However, a layer-4 switching device costs high and dispatches the query requests in a blind and random manner. In our proposed system, we design a new approach called Switching Search Proxy to replace the layer-4 switching device. The switching search proxy uses a content sensitive query partitioning scheme to dispatch the query requests. Such scheme enables a very effective query caching mechanism composed of a dynamic caching and static caching to greatly improve the performance of the search service. In our experiments, we found that up to 55% improvement in response time can be achieved by our switching search proxy, compared to the traditional layer-4 switch approach.