Indexing and Search Algorithmsfor Web shops :

Abstract: Web shops today needs to be more and more responsive, where one part of this responsivenessis fast product searches. One way of getting faster searches are by searching against anindex instead of directly against a database. Network Expertise Sweden AB (Net Exp) wants to explore different methods of implementingan index in their future web shop, building upon the open-source web shop platformSmartStore.NET. Since SmartStore.NET does all of its searches directly against itsdatabase, it will not scale well and will wear more on the database. The aim was thereforeto find different solutions to offload the database by using an index instead. A prototype that retrieved products from a database and made them searchable through anindex was developed, evaluated and implemented. The prototype indexed the data with aninverted index algorithm, and was made searchable with a search algorithm that mixed typeboolean queries with normal queries.