| In recent years the World Wide Web has gone through some remarkable changes. Consumers of data and content are increasingly taking the role of producers both individually and in communities such as Wikipedia and Sourceforge. However, this evolution has not taken place for one of the most important web applications: Internet search. Internet search is dominated by a small number of powerful companies: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. These companies control every aspect of the search process: collecting, indexing and searching content. Their data is stored in a centrally controlled monolithic database. Scaling and coverage problems are inherent to this approach. The aim of this project is to distribute Internet search functionality in such a way that communities of users and/or federations of small search systems provide search services in a collaborative way. Instead of getting all data to a centralised point and process queries centrally the project will distribute queries over many small autonomous search systems and process them locally. Specifically, the usage of keyword auctions as collaboration approach between a central search broker and autonomous local search systems will be investigated. |
