Abstract. Efficient and effective routing of content-based queries is an emerging problem in peer-to-peer networks, and can be seen as an extension of the traditional "resource selection" problem. Although some approaches have been proposed, finding the best architecture (defined by the network topology, the underlying selection method, and its integration into peer-to-peer networks) is still an open problem. This paper investigates different building blocks of such architectures, among them the decision-theoretic framework, CORI, hierarchical networks, distributed hash tables and HyperCubes. The evaluation on a large testbed shows that the decision-theoretic framework can be applied effectively and cost-efficiently onto peer-to-peer networks.