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Abstract

Time-travel text search enriches standard text search by temporal predicates, so that users of web archives can easily retrieve document versions that are considered relevant to a given keyword query and existed during a given time interval. Different index structures have been proposed to effciently support time-travel text search. None of them, however, can easily be updated as the Web evolves and new document versions are added to the web archive. In this work, we describe a novel index structure that effciently supports time-travel text search and can be maintained incrementally as new document versions are added to the web archive. Our solution uses a sharded index organization, bounds the number of spuriously read index entries per shard, and can be maintained using small in-memory buffers and append-only operations. We present experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets demonstrating that maintaining our novel index structure is an order of magnitude more efficient than periodically rebuilding one of the existing index structures, while query-processing performance is not adversely affected.