Ten Blue Links on Mars
It addresses the challenge of search under extreme latency for potential Mars colonization, with incremental relevance to Earth-based scenarios like rural areas.
This paper tackles the problem of providing a high-quality search experience on Mars, where speed-of-light delays cause tens of minutes of latency, by formulating it as a tradeoff between waiting for responses and pre-fetching or caching data, and presents case studies using TREC data to explore baseline techniques.
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.