otsinguaega

Otsinguaeg, Estonian for “search time,” is the duration between submitting a search query and receiving the results. It is a measure of latency in search systems and is used to describe the responsiveness of web search engines, database queries, and enterprise search applications.

In practice, otsinguaeg includes several stages: query parsing and planning, candidate retrieval from indexes, ranking and scoring, result formatting, and the actual network transmission of data to the user. In interactive systems, otsinguaeg is typically expressed in milliseconds and is expected to feel instantaneous to users.

Measuring otsinguaeg involves metrics such as average latency, median latency, and tail latencies like p95 or p99. Benchmarks distinguish between warm caches, where data is readily available, and cold caches, where the system must load data first. It is important to separate end-user perceived latency from backend processing time to diagnose where delays occur.

Factors that influence otsinguaeg include data size, index structure (for example inverted indices), hardware performance (CPU, memory, storage), software efficiency, and network latency. Additional influences are query complexity, language, personalization, and filtering requirements.

Reducing otsinguaeg involves indexing optimizations, effective caching strategies, distributed and parallel query processing, early termination in ranking, and the use of approximate search techniques for very large datasets. Designing systems that minimize worst-case latency while maintaining result quality is a central concern in information retrieval and user experience.