Chapter 5 DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

A multi-database model of distributed information retrieval is presented, in which people are assumed to have access to many searchable text databases. In such an environment, full-text information retrieval consists of discovering database contents, ranking databases by their expected ability to satisfy the query, searching a small number of databases, and merging results returned by different databases. This paper presents algorithms for each task. It also discusses how to reorganize conventional test collections into multi-database testbeds, and evaluation methodologies for multi-database experiments. A broad and diverse group of experimental results is presented to demonstrate that the algorithms are effective, efficient, robust, and scalable.