Ten Blue Links on Mars

TL;DR

This paper investigates how to deliver a high-quality search experience on Mars despite extreme latency, by exploring tradeoffs between response effort and data pre-fetching, and presents case studies using existing datasets.

Contribution

It formulates the search-from-Mars problem as a tradeoff space and explores baseline techniques through case studies, inspiring future research in high-latency search scenarios.

Findings

Baseline techniques show potential in managing high latency.

Pre-fetching strategies can improve user experience.

The problem has relevance to Earth-based high-latency scenarios.

Abstract

This paper explores a simple question: How would we provide a high-quality search experience on Mars, where the fundamental physical limit is speed-of-light propagation delays on the order of tens of minutes? On Earth, users are accustomed to nearly instantaneous response times from search engines. Is it possible to overcome orders-of-magnitude longer latency to provide a tolerable user experience on Mars? In this paper, we formulate the searching from Mars problem as a tradeoff between "effort" (waiting for responses from Earth) and "data transfer" (pre-fetching or caching data on Mars). The contribution of our work is articulating this design space and presenting two case studies that explore the effectiveness of baseline techniques, using publicly available data from the TREC Total Recall and Sessions Tracks. We intend for this research problem to be aspirational and inspirational - even if one is not convinced by the premise of Mars colonization, there are Earth-based scenarios such as searching from a rural village in India that share similar constraints, thus making the problem worthy of exploration and attention from researchers.