Adaptive Time-to-Live Strategies for Query Result Caching in Web Search Engines

An important research problem that has recently started to receive attention is the freshness issue in search engine result caches. In the current techniques in literature, the cached search result pages are associated with a fixed time-to-live (TTL) value in order to bound the staleness of search results presented to the users, potentially as part of a more complex cache refresh or invalidation mechanism. In this paper, we propose techniques where the TTL values are set in an adaptive manner, on a per-query basis. Our results show that the proposed techniques reduce the fraction of stale results served by the cache and also decrease the fraction of redundant query evaluations on the search engine backend compared to a strategy using a fixed TTL value for all queries.