Proximity Full-Text Searches of Frequently Occurring Words with a Response Time Guarantee

Abstract

Full-text search engines are important tools for information retrieval. In a proximity full-text search, a document is relevant if it contains query terms near each other, especially if the query terms are frequently occurring words. For each word in the text, we use additional indexes to store information about nearby words at distances from the given word of less than or equal to MaxDistance, which is a parameter. A search algorithm for the case when the query consists of high-frequently occurring words is discussed. In addition, we present results of experiments with different values of MaxDistance to evaluate the search speed dependence on the value of MaxDistance. These results show that the average time of the query execution with our indexes is 94.7–45.9 times (depending on the value of MaxDistance) less than that with standard inverted files when queries that contain high-frequently occurring words are evaluated. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.