Methods for Information Server Selection

摘要

The problem of using a broker to select a subset of available information servers in order to achieve a good trade-off between document retrieval effectiveness and cost is addressed. Server selection methods which are capable of operating in the absence of global information, and where servers have no knowledge of brokers, are investigated. A novel method using Lightweight Probe queries (LWP method) is compared with several methods based on data from past query processing, while random and Optimal server rankings serve as controls.