Suited to profiling, filtering and alerting services
Retrieves dynamic and rapidly changing data
Designed to be robust and scalable
Defines new protocols such as DTCP
Uses CORBA with C++
Defaults to searching file names but can be expanded to locate other content.
Can support metadata
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Articles & Reviews
Decentralized Resource Discovery in Large Peer Based Networks
Alpine Analysis: undated (March 3, 2002), by coderman
(Martin Peck) Describes problems with existing centralized search engines, including
scaling of hardware and bandwidth, access to non-Web data and currency. Pure
peer networks such as Freenet and Gnutella lack flexibility and performance,
broadcasting queries to peers and groups until the engine finds the information
or gives up, which does not scale well. Selective forwarding relies on a small
number of nodes, thus becoming susceptible to malicious activity such as false
advertising. Recommends the Alpine approach: metadata, "social networks",
control over bandwidth, historical profiles of peers for bandwidth, provision
of resources, and quality of responses, categorization of peers by the type
of material and modularity for easy extension of the protocols.