"Box + Solr = Content Search for Business" - Wei Zhao, Box

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June 2014
Box + Solr = Content Search for
Business

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Wei Zhao
Box backend engineer
wzhao@box.com

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to make organizations more productive,
competitive and collaborative by connecting
people and their most important information
Box mission

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25MM+
Users
225K+
Businesses
99%
Fortune 500

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Box search mission is to make user content
easy to discover.

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10Billion+
Documents
10TB+
Index size
100M+
Daily requests
Box uses Solr for search

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Quick Search

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Quick Search

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Full Search

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Sharding – splitting the index
Agenda
Highly available search
A few more things
1
2
3
4
5 Q&A
Currently working on

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We shard things

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Shard ID = File ID % Total Shards

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Multi-tenant – One big logical index for all users
Solr index
Shard1 Shard2 Shard3 ShardN

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Search scope

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File ID: 12345
OwnerID: user1
Parent Folders IDs: folder1, folder2
File Name: Solr.ppt
File Content: blah
......
A typical Solr Document

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Owner: User1
Parent: Folder1
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder3
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder2
Owner: User1
Parent:
Folder1
Folder4
File 1 File 2
File 3 File 4

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User1 with no share folder
Owner: User1
Parent: Folder1
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder3
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder2
Owner: User1
Parent:
Folder1
Folder4
File 1 File 2
File 3 File 4

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User2 shares Folder2 with User1
Owner: User1
Parent: Folder1
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder3
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder2
Owner: User1
Parent:
Folder1
Folder4
File 1 File 2
File 3 File 4

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User2 shares Folder2 with User1
Owner: User1
Parent: Folder1
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder3
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder2
Owner: User1
Parent:
Folder1
Folder4
File 1 File 2
File 3 File 4

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User2 shares Folder2 with User1
Owner: User1
Parent: Folder1
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder3
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder5
Owner: User1
Parent:
Folder1
Folder4
File 1 File 2
File 3 File 4
Removed
out of
Folder2

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User2 shares Folder2 with User1
Owner: User1
Parent: Folder1
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder3
Owner: User2
Parent: Folder5
Owner: User1
Parent:
Folder1
Folder4
File 1 File 2
File 3 File 4
Removed
out of
Folder2

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Highly Available Search

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• Index is highly available
• Search functionality is highly available

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Index workflow

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Box
Front
End
Upload
Index Queue
Queue 1
Queue 2
Queue 3
Indexer 1
Indexer 3
Indexer 2
MySQL
Index1
Index2
Index2

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Search workflow

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Box
Front
End
query HA
Proxy
Head
node
HA Proxy
1 2 3 N
Box
Front
End
query
HA
Proxy
Head
node
HA Proxy
1 2 3 N
Data center boundary

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A few more things

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File Content Search

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Box
Front
End
Upload
MySQL Box File
Storage
Indexer
Solr
Index
Text Extraction
Extracted
Text

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Multi-language support

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Raw file
content
Language
detector
English tokenizer
Spanish tokenizer
Japanese tokenizer
German tokenizer
file_content_en
File_content_es
{hola}
file_content_ja
.
.
.
.
File_content_de

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To Dos
• Scale language support
• Support document with mixed languages

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Search Warm-up

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• Front end informs backend to warm up on keyboard focus
• Backend prepares the search filter and caches it in a search session
• Backend sends a warm-up query to Solr

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What we are working on

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• Search suggestions
• Search operators
• Use machine learning to influence ranking
• Logical sharding
Things we are working on

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Question?

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Contact: wzhao@box.com
We are hiring!