Scalable Search Inverted Indexes and Beyond
Scalable Search Inverted Indexes and Beyond Inverted indexes speed up text search by listing which documents contain each word. This lets you answer queries fast without scanning every page. As your data grows, the index must scale without slowing down users. The challenge is to keep insertions fast, queries responsive, and storage affordable across many machines. One common approach is to split the data into shards. Each shard holds a portion of documents and its own posting lists. With 10 shards, ten million documents can be searched in parallel, and the results are merged in the end. Sharding also helps with distribution and resilience. ...