Have you ever found yourself waiting for results from your Internet search engine? Oh, sure, search for Kim Kardashian and the results come flying back at warp speed. But queries with vague terms are often automatically reformulated into complex queries that may take significantly longer to provide results.
Achieving a consistently fast response time, regardless of the obscurity of the search term, is a challenging goal, one that requires the combined efforts of experts in engineering systems, operational data, distributed systems, machine learning, and performance optimization. Recently, Microsoft Research joined forces with Pohang University of Science and Technology (opens in new tab) (POSTECH) in Korea to tackle this challenge, and together, they’ve attained promising results.
Leading the collaboration are Professor Seung-won Hwang from POSTECH and researchers Sameh Elnikety and Yuxiong He from Microsoft Research.
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Professor Seung-won Hwang participated in the 2014 Korea Day event at Microsoft Research Asia.
The goal of the collaborative project is to improve Bing search results. Even a few search queries that take too long to process (known as tail queries) can undermine user satisfaction and have a negative impact on revenues. In their research on how to reduce the latency in returning results for tail queries, researchers in the collaborative team must predict whether a query takes a long time to process and needs extra resources, such as selective parallelization, in order to resolve it quickly.
The team received the best paper runner-up award at WSDM 2015 in February. Pictured are Prof. Seung-won Hwang and Saehoon Kim from POSTECH (second and fourth from left), Yuxiong He from Microsoft Research (third from left), and WSDM program committee chairs.
The collaborative team has developed techniques that first identify and then accelerate tail queries, thereby improving server throughput by more than 70% in experimental trials. For example, by using past query logs, the team has developed a predictor that spots tail queries with a high rate of accuracy (98.9%). Those time-consuming queries are then handled by a resource manager that the team has perfected, which allocates additional hardware resources to the troublesome queries. These new techniques have been presented at top-tier conferences, including SIGIR 2014 and WSDM 2015, where the work received the best paper runner-up award.
As shown in this diagram, the predictor identifies time-consuming queries, which then are allocated additional hardware resources by the resource manager.
The search engine project is part of a larger program sponsored by the Korea Government Collaboration Program with the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (MSIP). Through this program, some of Professor Hwang’s doctoral students have worked as interns at Microsoft Research; later, during a sabbatical, the professor herself came to Microsoft Research as a visiting scientist.
Professor Hwang praises the program for exposing students to production-scale system problems, and calls it a great opportunity to work with top-notch researchers and to publish in top-tier conferences. The benefits of the program are mutual, as Microsoft researcher Yuxiong He points out. “The complementary knowledge and skill sets of the team members have empowered us to solve important practical problems for Microsoft and the entire IT industry,” she observes.
Sameh Elnikety also highly praised the program: “From my personal experience, this program has a positive impact to all involved: students get excellent training, faculty members work on important practical problems, and researchers collaborate with top faculty members, resulting in useful publications and tech transfers.”
Professor Hwang continues to collaborate with Microsoft Research to improve search results. The team’s next challenge is to optimize the tools to better handle queries generated from mobile devices—queries that often involve searching through geo-tagged datasets. And they’re making headway: Professor Hwang will be demonstrating a geo-tagged query optimizer at the upcoming 2015 Korea Day at Microsoft Research Asia, once again showing the power of academic-industry collaboration.
—Miran Lee, Principal Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research Asia
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Search and information retrieval