Proceedings of the 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Florence, Italy, May 2015.
Gennady Pekhimenko, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos*, Oriana Riva*, Karin Strauss*, Doug Burger*
Carnegie Mellon University
*Microsoft Research
Trending search topics cause unpredictable query load spikes that hurt the end-user search experience, particularly the mobile one, by introducing longer delays. To understand how trending search topics are formed and evolve over time, we analyze 21 million queries submitted during periods where popular events caused search query volume spikes. Based on our findings, we design and evaluate PocketTrend, a system that automatically detects trending topics in real time, identifies the search content associated to the topics, and then intelligently pushes this content to users in a timely manner. In that way, PocketTrend enables a client-side search engine that can instantly answer user queries related to trending events, while at the same time reducing the impact of these trends on the datacenter workload. Our results, using real mobile search logs, show that in the presence of a trending event, up to 13–17% of the overall search traffic can be eliminated from the datacenter, with as many as 19% of all users benefiting from PocketTrend.
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