Reasons to Consider Distributed Searching

• Reasons for Distributed Indexing
• Single orgs cannot maintain high quality for everything - specialists can do better - knowledge is greater closer to its source (but greater diversity means less standards)
• Indexing already needs to be distributed for global coverage and to reduce redundant network and server load - crawlers are searching just-in-case.
• Enables freemarket of multiple classifications (ontologies) (but less standards means more chaos)
• Successful central servers are swamped until they fail. (but supporters fund growth to the limit of technology - how far?)
• Replication of central servers is more expensive and wasteful. I.e. just-in-time sometimes cheaper than just-in-case.
• Reduce server load by distributing searching over several servers. (but network load and total server overhead is greater?)
• Alternative search services even for same speciality provide incentive to improve quality. (but also applies to central servers)
• Full content searches feasible on small scale, not on global scale.
• Smaller search service has lower barrier to entry.

Distributed Searching Requirements

• Distributed Indexing (consider distributed searching of central index)
• Organized Semantic Structure - otherwise we're flying blind
• Need either Single Standard for Query Language and Result Data or mappings between few standards - difficult either way
• How to do query refinement and relevance feedback with distributed search?

Alternative Architectures for Distributed Searching

• Centralized vs Distributed across many processes
• Immediate vs Distributed (delayed) across time (e.g. agents)
• Collection issues:
• Search server vs collection
• Localized vs Distributed collections
• Provider-specified vs User-specified collections
• Small (<100) vs Large (>100K) collections
• Flat vs Structured collections
• Static vs Dynamic
• Search index (preprocessed metadata) vs content (raw data)
• Flat list of search engines vs 2-levels (e.g. mediators) vs General Hierarchy vs Lattice vs Web (with cycles)
• Single vs Multiple indexes per domain area
• Centralized vs Distributed (delegated) control of many processes
• Communication issues:
• Synchronous vs Asynchronous communication between processes
• Connection vs Connectionless
• Client-Server vs Register-Notify
• Stateful vs Stateless
• Resident Search Software vs Uploaded Search Applets.
• Single Standard Queries vs Mapping between query schemes vs no standards
• Single Standard Results (metadata, ranking) vs Mapping between result few schemes vs no standards