PROTOTYPING A DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL SYSTEM THAT USES STATISTICAL RANKING

Centralized systems continue to dominate the information retrieval market, with increased competition from CD-ROM based systems. As more large organizations begin to implement office automation systems, however, many will find that neither of these types of retrieval systems will satisfy their requirements, especially those requirements involving easy integration into other systems and heavy usage by casual end users. A prototype distributed information retrieval system was designed and built using a distributed architecture and using statistical ranking techniques to help provide better service for the end user. The distributed architecture was shown to be a feasible alternative to centralized or CD-ROM information retrieval, and user testing of the ranking methodology showed both widespread user enthusiasm for this retrieval technique and very fast response times (on the order of one second for 300 megabytes of data).