Document Selection in a Distributed Search Engine Architecture

Distributed Search Engine Architecture (DSEA) hosts numerous independent topic-specific search engines and selects a subset of the databases to search within the architecture. The objective of this approach is to reduce the amount of space needed to perform a search by querying only a subset of the total data available. In order to manipulate data across many databases, it is most efficient to identify a smaller subset of databases that would be most likely to return the data of specific interest that can then be examined in greater detail. The selection index has been most commonly used as a method for choosing the most applicable databases as it captures broad information about each database and its indexed documents. Employing this type of database allows the researcher to find information more quickly, not only with less cost, but it also minimizes the potential for biases. This paper investigates the effectiveness of different databases selected within the framework and scope of the distributed search engine architecture. The purpose of the study is to improve the quality of distributed information retrieval.