DEWS: A decentralized engine for Web search

Abstract

Contemporary Web search is governed by centrally controlled search engines, which is not healthy for our online freedom and privacy. A better solution is to enable the Web to index itself in a decentralized manner. In this work we propose a decentralized Web search mechanism, named DEWS, which enables existing webservers to collaborate with each other to build a distributed index of the Web. DEWS can rank search results based on query keyword relevance and relative importance of webpages. DEWS also supports approximate matching of query keywords in web documents. Simulation results show that the ranking accuracy of DEWS is very close to the centralized case, while network overhead for collaborative search and indexing is logarithmic on network size.