System design interview question
Design a Distributed Document Search and Indexing Engine for a Global Wiki Platform (Like Wikipedia at Scale)
Design the backend architecture for a global collaborative encyclopedia platform serving 500M monthly active users across 6 continents, supporting 50M articles in 100+ languages with real-time full-text search capabilities. The system must handle 10K concurrent searches per second with sub-200ms latency, support incremental indexing as articles are created/modified (500 edits per second globally), and ensure search results are eventually consistent across regions while respecting regional content policies and language-specific ranking. Key constraints include: articles range from 10KB to 10MB, search queries are bursty and language-dependent, indexing must complete within 5 minutes of article modification, and the system must handle cascading failures gracefully without losing search availability.
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