PIRS: Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval System

Description

PIRS is a peer-to-peer (P2P) information retrieval system. The goal of PIRS is to enhance peer-to-peer systems with information retrieval-like search capabilities. Current P2P search is based on substring matching of keywords, which leaves much to be desired.

PIRS improves upon current commercial P2P systems (e.g., Gnutella and Kazaa) by adding three components:

  1. Metadata collector
  2. Metadata distributor
  3. Result ranker
Because PIRS functionality is independent of lower-level network management and query routing, it can be easily incorporated into today's commercial P2P file sharing systems.

Publications

  1. On Search in Peer to Peer File Sharing Systems, Wai Gen Yee and Ophir Frieder, ACM SAC, 2005 [PDF]
  2. The Design of PIRS, a Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval System, Wai Gen Yee and Ophir Frieder, DBISP2P 2004 Workshop [PDF]

Courses

CS 595 - Design and Analysis of Distributed System Infrastructures, Spring, 2004