Managing collaborative feedback information for distributed retrieval

Abstract

Despite the many research efforts invested recently in peerto-peer search engines, none of the proposed system has reached the level of quality and efficiency of their centralized counterpart. One of the main reasons for this inferior performance is the difficulty to attract a critical mass of users that would make the peer-to-peer system truly competitive. We argue that decentralized search mechanisms should not aim at replacing existing engines, but instead complement them by adding novel functionalities that would be difficult to provide in a centralized manner. This paper introduces an example of such a complementary search mechanism and presents the design of a distributed collaborative system for leveraging user feedback and document/user profiling information.