Graphsmedium45 minMobile Engineer

Search Evidence Path Finder

Mobile Engineer signal: shortest path + weighted graph in a on-device search context. This is a ProdMatch-owned mobile engineer drill, framed as a April 2026 Zoho Mobile Search simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

Zoho · Mobile Search

Freshness

April 2026

Product surface

on-device search

ProdMatch interview simulation based on product-team patterns; not a claim of a real company question.

Question

In on-device search, entities are connected by weighted evidence edges. For each query, find the least-cost evidence path from source to target while avoiding blocked entities.

Input

Weighted graph, blocked set, and q source-target queries.

Output

Minimum cost per query, or -1 if unreachable.

Constraints

1 <= nodes <= 100000
1 <= edges <= 300000
1 <= queries <= 100000
All weights are non-negative.

Concepts

offline sync
local cache
gesture streams
shortest path
weighted graph
retrieval quality

0-1 cost 2, 1-2 cost 3, query 0->2 -> 5

Approach

Try framing your own approach first. The 30 seconds you think before peeking is where learning happens.

Clean Solution

Reveal the approach first.

How well did you understand?

Your rating tunes when this problem shows up again.

Common Mistakes

Mark visited when enqueueing, not after repeated dequeue.
Do not ignore disconnected components if the product surface can have them.

Next Similar Problems

Sync Dependency DAG Recoverymedium Sync Evidence Path Finderhard Feed Dependency DAG Recoveryhard