Supporting entity search: a large-scale prototype search engine

Tao Cheng, Xifeng Yan, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Abstract: As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard page view," current search engines are increasingly inadequate. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g. phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. Therefore, we propose the concept of entity search, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. Towards our goal of supporting entity search, in the WISDM project at UIUC we build and evaluate our prototype search engine over a 2TB Web corpus. Our demonstration shows the feasibility and promise of a large-scale system architecture to support entity search.