Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph
Summary: Unicorn is an in-memory, social-graph-aware index for searching trillions of edges on commodity servers, prioritizing social proximity in results. It supports multi-hop queries with sub-second latencies and serves as Facebook Graph Search’s backend, detailing its data model and query language. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Michael Curtiss
- 2. Iain Becker
- 3. Tudor Bosman
- 4. Sergey Doroshenko
- 5. Lucian Grijincu
- 6. Tom Jackson
- 7. Sandhya Kunnatur
- 8. Soren Lassen
- 9. Philip Pronin
- 10. Sriram Sankar
- 11. Guanghao Shen
- 12. Gintaras Woss
- 13. Chao Yang
- 14. Ning Zhang
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2,764 | The Semiring Framework for Database Provenance | 2017 | PODS | 8.1574444e-05 |
| 4,450 | A1: A Distributed In-Memory Graph Database | 2020 | SIGMOD | 6.1741566e-05 |
| 5,799 | CGgraph: An Ultra-fast Graph Processing System on Modern Commodity CPU-GPU Co-processor | 2024 | VLDB | 5.3219334e-05 |
| 7,416 | MILC: Inverted List Compression in Memory | 2017 | VLDB | 4.7355258e-05 |
| 7,998 | Data Management for Social Networking | 2016 | PODS | 4.6101889e-05 |
| 8,093 | Scalable Distributed Inverted List Indexes in Disaggregated Memory | 2024 | SIGMOD | 4.5873721e-05 |
| 9,471 | Nezha: An Efficient Distributed Graph Processing System on Heterogeneous Hardware | 2025 | SIGMOD | 4.3341665e-05 |
| 9,614 | Auto-Approximation of Graph Computing | 2014 | VLDB | 4.3177432e-05 |
| 10,759 | PrivAGM: Secure Construction of Differentially Private Directed Attributed Graph Models on Decentralized Social Graphs | 2025 | VLDB | 4.1945683e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 70 | Hive - A Warehousing Solution Over a Map-Reduce Framework | 2009 | VLDB | 0.00059533166 |
| 73 | XRANK: Ranked Keyword Search over XML Documents | 2003 | SIGMOD | 0.00058443993 |
| 336 | Bidirectional Expansion For Keyword Search on Graph Databases | 2005 | VLDB | 0.00027020919 |
| 417 | Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning | 2007 | VLDB | 0.00023794574 |
| 2,410 | Scalable Join Processing on Very Large RDF Graphs | 2009 | SIGMOD | 8.8773796e-05 |
| 3,402 | TAO: How Facebook Serves the Social Graph | 2012 | SIGMOD | 7.1378698e-05 |
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Semantically Similar Papers
| Overall Rank | Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 506 | On Graph Query Optimization in Large Networks | 2010 | VLDB | 0.00021475362 |
| 7,290 | Topic-based Community Search over Spatial-Social Networks | 2020 | VLDB | 4.7742854e-05 |
| 4,072 | Performance and Scalability of Indexed Subgraph Query Processing Methods | 2015 | VLDB | 6.4727847e-05 |
| 651 | Efficient Subgraph Matching on Billion Node Graphs | 2012 | VLDB | 0.00018648572 |
| 334 | Fast and Practical Indexing and Querying of Very Large Graphs | 2007 | SIGMOD | 0.00027081079 |
| 999 | Effective Community Search for Large Attributed Graphs | 2016 | VLDB | 0.00014726563 |
| 12,025 | A Social Network Database that Learns How to Answer Queries | 2013 | CIDR | 4.1945683e-05 |
| 4,212 | Unicorn: A Unified Multi-tasking Model for Supporting Matching Tasks in Data Integration | 2023 | SIGMOD | 6.3555142e-05 |
| 5,030 | Nanosecond Indexing of Graph Data With Hash Maps and VLists | 2019 | SIGMOD | 5.7501994e-05 |
| 396 | One Trillion Edges: Graph Processing at Facebook-Scale | 2015 | VLDB | 0.00024424102 |