On-Demand Web Search Using Browser-Based Volunteer Computing

Abstract

Current solutions to the problem of finding valuable information on the Web suffer from several limitations, including inconvenient query languages, arbitrary sorting or results and out-of-date information. In this paper a different solution to this problem is described. It is based on the idea of distributed processing of web pages in real-time. To provide sufficient performance, the approach of volunteer computing is utilized. It is based on using web browsers of users visiting particular web pages. The browsers perform necessary computation in background, executing programs written in JavaScript. In this paper the architecture of the on-demand web crawling system is presented and details concerning implementation are provided.