An Improved Algorithm for Fast K-Word Proximity Search Based on Multi-Component Key Indexes

Abstract

A search query consists of several words. In a proximity full-text search, we want to find documents that contain these words near each other. This task requires much time when the query consists of high-frequently occurring words. If we cannot avoid this task by excluding high-frequently occurring words from consideration by declaring them as stop words, then we can optimize our solution by introducing additional indexes for faster execution. In a previous work, we discussed how to decrease the search time with multi-component key indexes. We had shown that additional indexes can be used to improve the average query execution time up to 130 times if queries consisted of high-frequently occurring words. In this paper, we present another search algorithm that overcomes some limitations of our previous algorithm and provides even more performance gain. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.