Associative Search in Peer to Peer Networks: Harnessing Latent Semantics

— The success of a P2P file-sharing network highly depends on the scalability and versatility of its search mechanism. Two particularly desirable search features are scope (ability to find infrequent items) and support for partial-match queries (queries that contain typos or include a subset of keywords). While centralized-index architectures (such as Napster) can support both these features, existing decentralized architectures seem to support at most one: prevailing unstructured P2P protocols (such as Gnutella and FastTrack) deploy a ”blind” search mechanism where the set of peers probed is unrelated to the query; thus they support partial-match queries but have limited scope. On the other extreme, the recently-proposed distributed hash tables (DHTs) such as CAN and CHORD, couple index location with the item’s hash value, and thus have good scope but can not effectively support partial-match queries. Another hurdle to DHTs deployment is their tight control of the overlay st...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Edith Cohen, Amos Fiat, Haim Kaplan
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2003, P2P file-sharing Network, Partial-match Queries, Search Mechanism