Design a web search engine pipeline

Q: Design a web search engine pipeline

This is a System Design interview question from Reuters for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

Design the high-level pipeline of a web search engine.

Assume you need to support internet-scale search (billions of web pages) with low-latency queries. Describe the major components and data flow for both:

Offline / batch side : from discovering web pages to building and maintaining an index.
Online / serving side : from when a user types a query to when they see ranked results.

In your answer, cover at least:

How you would discover and fetch documents from the web.
How you would parse, process, and index documents (e.g., inverted index, sharding, replication).
How a user query is processed, including query understanding/normalization.
How you would retrieve candidate documents efficiently.
How you would rank results (you may optionally mention ML ranking models).
How you would ensure low latency, scalability, and fault tolerance .
How you would log user interactions for future improvements.

You do not need exact APIs or code; focus on architecture, components, and data flow.

Design a web search engine pipeline

Solution

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