IR-Wire: A Research Tool for P2P Information Retrieval

We introduce a system for information retrieval research in the peer-to-peer file-sharing domain. Our system, IR-Wire, is based on the popular Gnutella protocol, giving us access to a large user base and a large data set. As a search tool, IR-Wire maintains many statistics and implements a number of information retrieval ranking functions. As a research tool, our main focus, IR-Wire contains a data logger and analyzer. The data logger logs both incoming and outgoing queries and query results and provides a way to create a snapshot of the entire data set shared by the users. The data analyzer provides a simple user interface for data analysis. We briefly discuss an analysis conducted on a million incoming queries that were collected in our log files.