A leading application of peer-to-peer technology is file sharing.
Because of its scale – in the millions of users daily – it is important
that file-sharing systems have good search capabilities. A
salient characteristic of these systems is that shared files are binary
and described solely by small descriptors, in contrast to the
self-describing nature of text document sharing systems. Experimental
evidence indicates that it is possible to adopt and modify
information retrieval techniques to these systems to improve their
search accuracy.