Characterization of Search Engine Caches

Search engines provide cached copies of indexed content so users will have something to “click on” if the remote resource is temporarily or permanently unavailable. Depending on their proprietary caching strategies, search engines will purge their indexes and caches of resources that exceed a threshold of unavailability. Although search engine caches are provided only as an aid to the interactive user, we are interested in building reliable preservation services from the aggregate of these limited caching services. But first, we must understand the contents of search engine caches. In this paper, we have examined the cached contents of Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo to profile such things as overlap between index and cache, size, MIME type and “staleness” of the cached resources. We also examined the overlap of the various caches with the hold

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Frank McCown, Michael L. Nelson
• Keywords: CORR 2007, Education, Engine, Resources, Search Engine Caches