The Efficacy of GlOSS for the Text Database Retrieval Problem

The popularity of on-line document databases has led to a new problem: finding which text databases (out of many candidate choices) are the most relevant to a user. Identifying the relevant databases for a given query is the text database discovery problem. The first part of this paper presents a practical solution based on estimating the result size of a query and a database. The method is termed GlOSS--Glossary of Servers Server. The second part of this paper evaluates the effectiveness of GlOSS based on a trace of real user queries. In addition, we analyze the storage cost of our approach.