KMV-peer: a robust and adaptive peer-selection algorithm

The problem of fully decentralized search over many collections is considered. The objective is to approximate the results of centralized search (namely, using a central index) while controlling the communication cost and involving only a small number of collections. The proposed solution is couched in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, but can also be applied in other setups. Peers publish per-term summaries of their collections. Specifically, for each term, the range of document scores is divided into intervals; and for each interval, a KMV (K Minimal Values) synopsis of its documents is created. A new peer-selection algorithm uses the KMV synopses and two scoring functions in order to adaptively rank the peers, according to the relevance of their documents to a given query. The proposed method achieves high-quality results while meeting the above criteria of efficiency. In particular, experiments are done on two large, real-world datasets; one is blogs and the other is web data. These experiments show that the algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and is robust over different collections, various scoring functions and multi-term queries.