Static score bucketing in inverted indexes

Abstract

Maintaining strict static score order of inverted lists is a heuristic used by search engines to improve the quality of query results when the entire inverted lists cannot be processed. This heuristic, however, increases the cost of index generation and requires complex index build algorithms. In this paper, we study a new index organization based on static score bucketing. We show that this new technique significantly improves in index build performance while having minimal impact on the quality of search results.