In this paper we study three basic and key issues related to Web query processing: load balance, broker behavior, and performance by individual index servers. Our study, while preliminary, does reveal interesting tradeoffs: (1) load unbalance at low ...

The TREC.GOV collection makes a valuable web testbed for distributed information retrieval methods because it is naturally partitioned and includes 725 web-oriented queries with judged answers. It can usefully model aspects of government and large ...

Collection selection has been a research issue for years. Typically, in related work, precomputed statistics are employed in order to estimate the expected result quality of each collection, and subsequently the collections are ranked accordingly. Our ...