Bender, MatthiasMichel, SebastianWeikum, GerhardZimmer, ChristianVossen, GottfriedLeymann, FrankLockemann, PeterStucky, Wolffried2019-10-112019-10-1120053-88579-394-6https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/28299This paper presents the MINERVA project that protoypes a distributed search engine based on P2P techniques. MINERVA is layered on top of a Chord-style overlay network and uses a powerful crawling, indexing, and search engine on every autonomous peer. We formalize our system model and identify the problem of efficiently selecting promising peers for a query as a pivotal issue. We revisit existing approaches to the database selection problem and adapt them to our system environment. Measurements are performed to compare different selection strategies using real-world data. The experiments show significant performance differences between the strategies and prove the importance of a judicious peer selection strategy. The experiments also present first evidence that a small number of carefully selected peers already provide the vast majority of all relevant results.enText/Conference Paper1617-5468