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Free keywords:
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Abstract:
The solution that we have developed and advocate in this paper is based on the
postulation that we cited above as a motivation for the general direction of
P2P search engines: \emph{give the Web back to the people}! We simply observe
the queries and behavior of the thousands or millions of users that we expect
to be active in a P2P network. More specifically, we monitor queries on the
peers where they are initially posed and post them to the distributed
directory, where they are aggregated so that interesting correlations can be
inferred. Obviously, the details of this method need to be carefully worked out
to ensure scalability; we will explain this in the paper. The key point to
emphasize here is that a querying peer whose query keywords exhibit
correlations has a good chance to efficiently find a directory entry that helps
to identify the best peers with files that match multiple terms of the query. A
potential caveat to our approach could be that user monitoring and query
logging is a breach with user privacy. But it is exactly the key strength of
the P2P approach that, unlike with a centralized Web search engine that logs
queries and click-stream information, every peer is in a perfect position to
define its own policies, would reveal critical data at its discretion, and has
full control over the local software to enforce its specified policies. In
other words, community-wide collaboration is desired and encouraged but not
forced, and peers remain perfectly autonomous.