The major cause of the problems discussed previously
is that search and index services are too centralised. Whilst the
Web documents are distributed and scattered at different places on the Web, databases services are
centralised with their own servers. An ideal solution is to have a distributed and local
search process.
A distributed and local search process would mean the searching is done at many servers around
the Web, and not just at one or two servers. This is like having a database service at every
server. This would solve the problem of accessing. And as the number of Web users increase,
the accessing problem will not worsen because the number of Web sites would increase proportionally.
figure=ideal.eps Ideal Database System
figure=actual.eps Feasible Database System
Although the above solution is logical, it is not feasible. It is impossible to have an index of all documents on the Web contained in every Web server. A more feasible solution is to have :
Each of the indexes in the Referring List should be small in size, and only contain
necessary information, so a large number of these indexes can be stored in a
Referring List at each
server. So how could the searching, updating, and making be done in this system?