Experimental study on semi-structured peer-to-peer information retrieval network

In the recent decades, retrieval systems deployed over peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks have been investigated as an alternative to centralised search engines. Although modern search engines provide efficient document retrieval, they possess several drawbacks. In order to alleviate their problems, P2P Information Retrieval (P2PIR) systems provide an alternative architecture to the traditional centralised search engine. Users and creators of web content in such networks have full control over what information they wish to share as well as how they share it. The semi-structured P2P architecture has been proposed where the underlying approach organises similar document in a peer, often using clustering techniques, and promotes willing peers as super peers (or hubs) to traffic queries to appropriate peers with relevant content. However, no systematic evaluation study has been performed on such architectures. In this paper, we study the performance of three cluster-based semi-structured P2PIR models and explain the effectiveness of several important design considerations and parameters on retrieval performance, as well as the robustness of these types of network