What is Average or Characteristic Path Length

Searching is likely to be the next most important service on the Internet after communication. At present centralized Internet search engines can not search a large part of the Internet content, especially those which are behind local search engines. This situation has created disjointed islands of information. P2P networking paradigm has the potential to integrate these under a single unified internet wide search service. However this search infrastructure will have to allow users to perform meaning based search. Therefore the P2P system will need technologies to capture the meaning of what the users intend to search for and then identify relevant objects. This matching between user’s search intention and objects will go beyond simple keyword based comparison. In this chapter the authors present the required techniques to enable a Web architecture that satisfy these needs.