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Abstract:
We consider a network of autonomous peers forming a logically global but
physically distributed search engine, where every peer has its own local
collection generated by independently crawling the web. A challenging task in
such systems is to efficiently route user queries to peers that can deliver
high quality results and be able to rank these returned results, thus
satisfying the users' information need. However, the problem inherent with this
scenario is selecting a few promising peers out of an a priori unlimited number
of peers. In recent research a rather strict notion of semantic overlay
networks has been established. In most approaches, peers are connected to other
peers based on a rigid semantic profile by clustering them based on their
contents. In contrast, our strategy follows the spirit of peer autonomy and
creates semantic overlay networks based on the notion of ``peer-to-peer
dating''. Peers are free to decide which connections they create and which they
want to avoid based on various usefulness estimators. The proposed techniques
can be easily integrated into existing systems as they require only small
additional bandwidth consumption as most messages can be piggybacked onto
established communication. We show how we can greatly benefit from these
additional semantic relations during query routing in search engines, such as
Minerva, and in the JXP algorithm, which computes the PageRank authority
measure in a completely decentralized manner.
