On 7 January 2011, Eelco Eerenberg defended his MSc thesis “Towards Distributed Information Retrieval based on Economic Models”. The MSc project was supervised by Djoerd Hiemstra, Kien Tjin-Kam-Jet, and me.
“Towards Distributed Information Retrieval based on Economic Models”[download]
The aim of this research is to build a successful distributed information retrieval system based on an economic model, allowing servers to open up their part of the deep web. This research consists of three parts: 1) selecting suitable economic models, 2) simulating these models, and 3) performing a real-world test. We found the models of Vickrey auction and bond redistribution to be the most suitable ones. These models behaved well in our simulation and both outperformed a naive comparison model. The Vickrey auction model performed best in a scenario that mostly resembles the Internet. On average 69% of all models with a strong correlation between the economic outcomes and the performance of information retrieval (Kendall’s-τ > 0.6) is a Vickrey auction model. In the real-world test we show that users appreciate both the use and administration of an information retrieval system based on an economic model. Furthermore, if we apply a perfect categorization, the economic model outperforms the comparison engine with a 66% increase in performance.