Optimal crawling strategies for web search engines

Abstract

Web Search Engines employ multiple so-called crawlers to maintain local copies of web pages. But these web pages are frequently updated by their owners, and therefore the crawlers must regularly revisit the web pages to maintain the freshness of their local copies. In this paper, we propose a two-part scheme to optimize this crawling process. One goal might be the minimization of the average level of staleness over all web pages, and the scheme we propose can solve this problem. Alternatively, the same basic scheme could be used to minimize a possibly more important search engine embarrassment level metric: The frequency with which a client makes a search engine query and then clicks on a returned url only to find that the result is incorrect. The first part our scheme determines the (nearly) optimal crawling frequencies, as well as the theoretically optimal times to crawl each web page. It does so within an extremely general stochastic framework, one which supports a wide range of complex update patterns found in practice. It uses techniques from probability theory and the theory of resource allocation problems which are highly computationally efficient - crucial for practicality because the size of the problem in the web environment is immense. The second part employs these crawling frequencies and ideal crawl times as input, and creates an optimal achievable schedule for the crawlers. Our solution, based on network flow theory, is exact as well as highly efficient. An analysis of the update patterns from a highly accessed and highly dynamic web site is used to gain some insights into the properties of page updates in practice. Then, based on this analysis, we perform a set of detailed simulation experiments to demonstrate the quality and speed of our approach.