Chora: Expert-based P2P Web Search

Halldor Isak Gylfason, Omar Khan, and Grant Schoenebeck


Abstract

We present Chora, a P2P web search engine which complements, not replaces, traditional web search by using peers’ web viewing history to recommend useful web sites to queriers. Chora is designed around a two-step paradigm. First, Chora determines which peers to query and then it executes a query across these peers. Each peer uses a desktop search engine to query their local web history and retrieve results ordered by relevance. To determine which peers to query, a small sketch of the information available from each peer is stored in a DHT. Peers with sketches indicating that they may have relevant information are queried. The query is dispersed through an ad hoc network connect- ing only those machines in the query and is optimized for getting good results as quickly as possible.


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