Tianji: Implementation of an Efficient Tracking Engine in the Mobile Internet Era

In the mobile Internet era, users access interesting information in a continuous manner rather than as one-time results through search engines. The traditional link-based ranking algorithms typically return the relevant “popular”web pages. The current, most important web pages are ranked lower than these pages. Furthermore, most of the results are repeated when the user submits the same query days later. In this paper, we have described a novel service called tracking engine. The tracking engine allows users to enter and save queries, displays time-sensitive information, and notifies users when new, relevant information appears. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution seen in such a service in the mobile Internet era. First, our tracking engine called Tianji crawls the web pages based on time priority and constructs a new index structure, which enables a faster match of web pages to related keywords. Then, we develop a ranking model based on the correlation between time and importance. The experimental results show that the ranking model of Tianji has better performance than existing time-sensitive ranking methods in terms of timeliness and relevance.