Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Authenticating The Query Results Of Text Search Engines, Hwee Hwa Pang, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

The number of successful attacks on the Internet shows that it is very difficult to guarantee the security of online search engines. A breached server that is not detected in time may return incorrect results to the users. To prevent that, we introduce a methodology for generating an integrity proof for each search result. Our solution is targeted at search engines that perform similarity-based document retrieval, and utilize an inverted list implementation (as most search engines do). We formulate the properties that define a correct result, map the task of processing a text search query to adaptations of existing threshold-based …