pSearch

Abstract

We describe an efficient peer-to-peer information retrieval system, pSearch; that supports state-of-the-art content- and semantic-based full-text searches. pSearch avoids the scalability problem of existing systems that employ centralized indexing, or index/query flooding. It also avoids the nondeterminism that is exhibited by heuristic-based approaches. In pSearch; documents in the network are organized around their vector representations (based on modern document ranking algorithms) such that the search space for a given query is organized around related documents, achieving both efficiency and accuracy.