Suitability of Signature Indexing Over the World Wide Web

Signature indexing has been studied extensively in text database or other databases for many years. The main advantages of a signature le as an access index are its small size, distributability, the ability to index information of a wide variety of types, ease of maintenance, and the ability to provide fuzzy indexing. These features are precisely what are needed for a good access index for indexing the World Wide Web and web-related large data depositories such as web caches and search engines. However, there has not been a study to comprehensively compare the features of signature indexing with the needs of web indexing. This paper compares the features of signature indexing with the needs of access indexes over the Web. The comparison provides a convincing argument that signature indexing is very suited for indexing information over the Web.