Performance evaluation of service management algorithms for distributed search engines

The ADSA (Adaptive Distributed Search and Advertising) project has advocated the use of a distributed search architecture that allows for many search engines to be independently owned and controlled, offering many advantages over the common centralised search architectures of today. Moreover, ADSA has introduced the facility for generating revenue from providing a search service. A number of quantitative parameters govern the functioning of the ADSA system, these parameters are called search service parameters; and the process of adjusting these parameters is called Search Service Management. This paper introduces the ADSA system briefly, and thereafter presents a solution to one management problem, that of Service Management Strategies that lead to maximum revenue generation. We present the ADSA economic model, and introduce a pricing function that describes a relationship between service price and related service parameters. We also describe the initial experiments performed to evaluate the performance management algorithms that were designed to meet the above requirement of dynamic service price adjustment leading to maximum profit.