A Peer-to-Peer Based Text Sharing and Retrieval System

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, which enable queries over an amount of documents distributed among a dynamic set of peers, have been more and more popular. This paper presents a text sharing and retrieval system which is layered on top of an unstructured P2P overlay network where every autonomous peer has powerful indexing and searching ability. By means of appropriate peer join policy and parameter value setting, our system not only efficiently supports various kinds of queries, such as metadata-based queries, content-based queries and the boolean operations between them, but also has significant scalability. The system also provides friendly GUI for merging and displaying the query results and has already been used by many universities and institutions.