A development tool for search in distributed system

A tool for information retrieval research and development in the peer-to-peer file-sharing domain is introduced. It is based on the popular Gnutella protocol granting us access to an enormous user base and a large data set. As an information retrieval tool, this system maintains many statistics and implements a number of information retrieval ranking functions. As a development tool, which is the main focus of this paper, it contains a data logger and an analyzer. The data logger allows users to log both incoming and outgoing queries and query results which eventually provide a way to generate a snapshot of the entire data set shared by the users. The data analyzer provides a simple user interface for performing analysis on collected data. An analysis conducted on a million incoming queries that were collected in our log files is discussed.