Search engines are still on the leading edge of Internet technologies. The current arena in search engine applications is dominated by large corporations that provide search services based on traditional crawling / indexing techniques, through powerful clusters of servers. The main concern of such corporations are multimedia and personalization, whereas the research in this field is looking ahead; in particular to the distribution of information and computational resources, which can be obtained by adopting suitable technologies. In fact, many researchers are concentrating their effort in the task of supplanting the centralized model of the web by giving priority to client-based, instead of server-based, applications. In our opinion, this alternative approach may take advantage of P2P information sharing and retrieval. In fact, nowadays, several P2P applications exist, which are responsible for almost half of the Internet bit transfer (the current estimate is thousands of terabytes). Furthermore, recent progresses in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Software Agents should be helpful in the task of devising novel technological platforms able to ensure appropriate support to research in the area of information retrieval. We do believe that a new generation of infrastructures, systems, and algorithms can be developed by resorting to P2P and agent-based solutions, so that Internet users will be provided with a common set of tools able to take advantage of data and task distribution in the task of retrieving and sharing relevant information. While information is increasing at an impressive rate, it is still (typically) made available to users through web interfaces – which are actually mainly suitable to human beings rather than to software applications. Users are accustomed to connect to many sites characterized by heterogeneous interfaces, as well as to switch among them in order to submit and to retrieve preliminary and intermediate data. An integrated access to this huge amount of information requires complex searching and retrieval software. In particular, data / process integration is concerned with how to link data, how to select and extract information, and how to pipe retrieval and analysis steps. The need for moving from an interactive to an automated approach, with the aim of managing information, requires new automation technologies, tools, and applications.

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