The MINERVA Project: Database Selection in the Context of P2P Search
Matthias Bender, Sebastian Michel, Gerhard Weikum, Christian Zimmer, Gottfried Vossen, Frank Leymann, Peter C. Lockemann, Wolffried Stucky · 2005
Abstract: This paper presents the MINERVA project that protoypes a distributed search engine based on P2P techniques. MINERVA is layered on top of a Chord-style overlay network and uses a powerful crawling, indexing, and search engine on every autonomous peer. We formalize our system model and identify the problem of efficiently selecting promising peers for a query as a pivotal issue. We revisit existing approaches to the database selection problem and adapt them to our system environment. Measurements are performed to compare different selection strategies using real-world data. The experiments show significant performance differences between the strategies and prove the importance of a judicious peer selection strategy. The experiments also present first evidence that a small number of carefully selected peers already provide the vast majority of all relevant results. 1