Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph
Summary: Unicorn adapts in-memory information-retrieval indexing to search trillions of social-graph edges with socially proximate ranking at Facebook scale. Its distinctive apply/extract operators support multi-hop, semantically rich graph queries with subsecond latency. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Michael Curtiss (Meta)
- 2. Iain Becker (Meta)
- 3. Tudor Bosman (Meta)
- 4. Sergey Doroshenko (Meta)
- 5. Lucian Grijincu (Meta)
- 6. Tom Jackson (Meta)
- 7. Sandhya Kunnatur (Meta)
- 8. Soren Lassen (Meta)
- 9. Philip Pronin (Meta)
- 10. Sriram Sankar (Meta)
- 11. Guanghao Shen (Meta)
- 12. Gintaras Woss (Meta)
- 13. Chao Yang (Meta)
- 14. Ning Zhang (Meta)
BibTeX Citation
@article{curtiss_vldb13,
title = {{Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph}},
author = {Curtiss, Michael and Becker, Iain and Bosman, Tudor and Doroshenko, Sergey and Grijincu, Lucian and Jackson, Tom and Kunnatur, Sandhya and Lassen, Soren and Pronin, Philip and Sankar, Sriram and Shen, Guanghao and Woss, Gintaras and Yang, Chao and Zhang, Ning},
journal = {PVLDB},
series = {{VLDB} '13},
volume = {6},
number = {11},
pages = {1150--1161},
doi = {10.14778/2535568.201},
url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2535568.201},
year = {2013}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2,503 | The Semiring Framework for Database Provenance | 2017 | PODS | 8.4964654e-05 |
| 3,924 | A1: A Distributed In-Memory Graph Database | 2020 | SIGMOD | 7.015626e-05 |
| 5,075 | CGgraph: An Ultra-fast Graph Processing System on Modern Commodity CPU-GPU Co-processor | 2024 | VLDB | 6.3740128e-05 |
| 6,791 | MILC: Inverted List Compression in Memory | 2017 | VLDB | 5.7723936e-05 |
| 7,492 | Scalable Distributed Inverted List Indexes in Disaggregated Memory | 2024 | SIGMOD | 5.6047664e-05 |
| 8,017 | Data Management for Social Networking | 2016 | PODS | 5.5064531e-05 |
| 9,605 | Nezha: An Efficient Distributed Graph Processing System on Heterogeneous Hardware | 2025 | SIGMOD | 5.247855e-05 |
| 9,749 | Auto-Approximation of Graph Computing | 2014 | VLDB | 5.227679e-05 |
| 10,992 | PrivAGM: Secure Construction of Differentially Private Directed Attributed Graph Models on Decentralized Social Graphs | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 32 | Hive - A Warehousing Solution Over a Map-Reduce Framework | 2009 | VLDB | 0.00050111008 |
| 77 | XRANK: Ranked Keyword Search over XML Documents | 2003 | SIGMOD | 0.00037048607 |
| 302 | Bidirectional Expansion For Keyword Search on Graph Databases | 2005 | VLDB | 0.00021963347 |
| 366 | Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning | 2007 | VLDB | 0.00020039981 |
| 1,979 | Scalable Join Processing on Very Large RDF Graphs | 2009 | SIGMOD | 9.3621296e-05 |
| 3,140 | TAO: How Facebook Serves the Social Graph | 2012 | SIGMOD | 7.7176906e-05 |
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Semantically Similar Papers
| # | Overall Rank | Paper | Year | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 352 | On Graph Query Optimization in Large Networks | 2010 | VLDB |
| 2 | 7,006 | Topic-based Community Search over Spatial-Social Networks | 2020 | VLDB |
| 3 | 3,477 | Performance and Scalability of Indexed Subgraph Query Processing Methods | 2015 | VLDB |
| 4 | 442 | Efficient Subgraph Matching on Billion Node Graphs | 2012 | VLDB |
| 5 | 322 | Fast and Practical Indexing and Querying of Very Large Graphs | 2007 | SIGMOD |
| 6 | 706 | Effective Community Search for Large Attributed Graphs | 2016 | VLDB |
| 7 | 12,222 | A Social Network Database that Learns How to Answer Queries | 2013 | CIDR |
| 8 | 3,436 | Unicorn: A Unified Multi-tasking Model for Supporting Matching Tasks in Data Integration | 2023 | SIGMOD |
| 9 | 4,701 | Nanosecond Indexing of Graph Data With Hash Maps and VLists | 2019 | SIGMOD |
| 10 | 389 | One Trillion Edges: Graph Processing at Facebook-Scale | 2015 | VLDB |