Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in recent years with the expansion of the
World Wide Web and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and …

One of the determining factors of the quality of Web search engines is the size of their index.
In addition to its influence on search result quality, the size of the indexed Web can also tell …

Federated search (federated information retrieval or distributed information retrieval) is a
technique for searching multiple text collections simultaneously. Queries are submitted to a …

We revisit a problem introduced by Bharat and Broder almost a decade ago: How to sample
random pages from the corpus of documents indexed by a search engine, using only the …

Random walk based graph sampling has been recognized as a fundamental technique to
collect uniform node samples from a large graph. In this paper, we first present a …

Web search evaluation is the process of measuring the effectiveness of a Web search
system. Such an evaluation helps in identifying the most effective one and helps the users to …

Online social networks have become very popular in recent years and their number of users
is already measured in many hundreds of millions. For various commercial and sociological …

Online social networks have become a major force in today's society and economy. The
largest of today's social networks may have hundreds of millions to more than a billion users …

Hybrid human/computer database systems promise to greatly expand the usefulness of
query processing by incorporating the crowd for data gathering and other tasks. Such …

Networks are characterized by nodes and edges. While there has been a spate of recent
work on estimating the number of nodes in a network, the edge-estimation question appears …