Abstract:Web search engine has become a very important tool for finding information efficiently from the massive Web data. With the explosive growth of the Web data, traditional centralized search engines become harder to catch up with the growing step of people's information needs. With the rapid development of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, the notion of P2P Web search has been proposed and quickly becomes a research focus. The goal of this paper is to give a brief summary of current P2P Web search technologies in order to facilitate future research. First, some main challenges for P2P Web search are presented. Then, key techniques for building a feasible and efficient P2P Web search engine are reviewed, including system topology, data placement, query routing, index partitioning, collection selection, relevance ranking and Web crawling. Finally, three recently proposed novel P2P Web search prototypes are introduced.