Improving collection selection with overlap awareness in P2P search engines

  • Authors:

  • Matthias Bender;Sebastian Michel;Peter Triantafillou;Gerhard Weikum;Christian Zimmer

  • Affiliations:

  • Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany;University of Patras, Rio, Greece;Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany;Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Collection selection has been a research issue for years. Typically, in related work, precomputed statistics are employed in order to estimate the expected result quality of each collection, and subsequently the collections are ranked accordingly. Our thesis is that this simple approach is insufficient for several applications in which the collections typically overlap. This is the case, for example, for the collections built by autonomous peers crawling the web. We argue for the extension of existing quality measures using estimators of mutual overlap among collections and present experiments in which this combination outperforms CORI, a popular approach based on quality estimation. We outline our prototype implementation of a P2P web search engine, coined MINERVA, that allows handling large amounts of data in a distributed and self-organizing manner. We conduct experiments which show that taking overlap into account during collection selection can drastically decrease the number of collections that have to be contacted in order to reach a satisfactory level of recall, which is a great step toward the feasibility of distributed web search.