System design interview question
"Design search over tweets. A user searches a term and gets matching tweets — and during a live event, a tweet posted three seconds ago should already be findable. 500 million tweets a day, and searches spike enormously during breaking news."
real-time indexing at extreme write velocity, which inverts the usual search trade-offs. Web search can rebuild indexes over hours; here the index must absorb 6,000 writes per second and make them searchable in seconds. The distinguishing content is: an in-memory real-time index, recency-dominant ranking, and the fact that the corpus is unbounded while queries almost always want the recent slice.
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