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 di erent 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 e ective e cient robust and scalable