Publications

The following presentation and thesis document provide an indepth look at the Temporal Search Engine and recent work completed on it.

Presentation - System Overview

Thesis -
Improving Query Retrieval Times in the Temporal Search Engine
29 June 2005
Ryan Sheahan

Abstract
As we come to rely on the World Wide Web as a primary information resource, maintaining versions and histories of documents becomes important. Since content can easily change on a page, having an archive of versions of a web page allows users to maintain the content of their bookmarks instead of simply the URL. Also, with a recorded document history we can compare versions of pages over time to see how they change.

The Temporal Search Engine tracks these changes and allows a user to search through an archive specifying a date range. In a previous version, the Temporal Search Engine collected and maintained an archive of searchable web pages. Also, users could select the number of days they wanted to search over, view versions of pages, and the differences between them. However, it had a logic flaw that caused it to incorrectly return results by missing documents that were archived outside of a query range. In this work, we show that we can address the deficiencies in the previous version by implementing a temporal index system over the archive. We show that we can also improve the retrieval time of the Temporal Search Engine with this implementation.