Basic concepts

In this project, we've combined two basic concepts into an application: the peer-2-peer network and the fulltext search. In order to explain more about our project, a broad definition of these two concepts must be established.

On one hand, we have the peer-2-peer network. This is a network type where, in contrast to the classic client-server model, each participating node has equal rights.

On the other hand, there's the full text search. This is a type of purely syntactical search, where the goal is to find given words in a large set of documents. Often this process if divided into two phases: The indexing phase - where documents are collected, prepared and indexed - and the search phase - where requests are received, corresponding documents are gathered, ranked and displayed to the user.