Patent ID: 7716179

Claim:
A computer-implemented method, comprising synchronizing content items across a distributed system in which a plurality of computer systems are communicatively coupled to one another via one or more networks, each of the computer systems including a computer-readable storage device, which computer-readable storage devices collectively store the content items, wherein for a subject content item said synchronizing includes reading the content item by one of the computer systems of the distributed system, the content item being read by determining its storage location in an address space of the distributed system using a distributed hash table (DHT) routing algorithm; modifying the content item to produce a modified content item; and writing the modified content item to its storage location as determined by the DHT routing algorithm and to storage locations at a further R 1 computer systems of the distributed system, wherein R 1 is less than or equal to R 2 which is less than or equal to R 3 , and R 1 is number of computer systems of the distributed system with unique identifiers closest to a respective key of the subject content item have a redundant copy of the subject content item; at least R 2 number of the computer systems have copies of any respective one of the content items for all of the content items, and none of the computer systems farther than R 3 in the address space of the distributed system have a copy of the subject content item, and wherein the content items comprise termlists and results for Internet search queries consisting of one or more keywords are determined by fetching, from storage locations within the distributed system, bitmasks corresponding to prefixes of hash keys for the termlists and intersecting them with one another to find a group of termlists which include all of the keywords in the search queries.