A Hybrid P2P Search Engine for Social Learning

Social learning is showing one of the immersive potentialities for human knowledge gathering on the Internet throughout the last decade. Due to rapid growth of Internet, people can communicate with each other using IM (Instant Messaging), WWW and P2P. IM Services, such as, Yahoo, Twitter, Google Talk, ICQ (I seek you), etc. which provides individual and group communications. Web search engines (Google, Yahoo, AOL etc.) collect versatile information by crawling web directories, and web public documents (html, PDF, text, etc.) throughout the world. P2P (Gnutella, Napster, Free net, etc.) serves file sharing between and/or among users. However, IM, WEB and P2P do not support WW, which indicates WHO the right person/user is and WHAT the right topic a user is looking for. To overcome the WW issues, this research presents a hybrid search engine called P2P_SSE (P2P Social Search Engine) which can find the WW and serves users queries for the support of social learning.