Methodologies for distributed information retrieval

Text collections have traditionally been located at a single site and managed as a monolithic whole. However, it is now common for a collection to be spread over several hosts and for these hosts to be geographically separated. The authors examine several alternative approaches to distributed text retrieval. They report on their experience with a full implementation of these methods, and give retrieval efficiency and retrieval effectiveness results for collections distributed over both a local area network and a wide area network. They conclude that, compared to monolithic systems, distributed information retrieval systems can be fast and effective, but that they are not efficient.