Miguel Rio, Joaquim Macedo, Vasco Freitas
Universidade do Minho
Departamento de Informática
P-4700-320 Braga, Portugal
Tel.: +351 253 604475
Fax.: +351 253 604471
E-mail: {rio,macedo,vf} (at) uminho.pt
In this paper, a distributed index mesh based on cooperative agents is proposed for distributed searching and retrieval in the Internet. The technique results from adopting several extensions to the whois++/CIP centroid technology. The extensions result mainly from including weighted terms in the exported index objects. Weights are computed using well-known information retrieval techniques. The query routing algorithm enables an efficient traversal of the index mesh even considering a pessimistic approach. The proposed system is a good starting point for effective Internet document searching.