Crawling Records on the Inter-Planetary Name System

Abstract: This thesis studies the characteristics of data hosted on the interplanetary name system, which is a part of the interplanetary file system. From these records, information such as file names, locations, and sizes, was investigated. Data was collected on the number of peers hosting the records, thereby determining the decentralization of the record on the network. Data on how often content on the network changes, were collected and investigated. In addition to evaluating records, a search engine was prototyped to show how to integrate the data into a system. A large part of the network was crawled and the rate of change was found to be high. Most of the peers were found to host HTML files. Most content identifiers found were hosted by more than one peer. This means that a search engine needs to be able to support text file formats and revisit peers regularly to be up-to-date with the records.