Abstract

We propose a method to evaluate queries using a last-resort semantic cache in a distributed Web search engine. The cache stores a group of frequent queries and for each of these queries it keeps minimal data, that is, the list of machines that produced their answers. The method for evaluating the queries uses the inverse frequency of the terms in the queries stored in the cache (Idf) to determine when the results recovered from the cache are a good approximation to the exact answer set. Experiments show that the method is effective and efficient. © 2009 Springer.