Patent ID: 7263560

Claim:
A peer computing system, comprising: a plurality of peer nodes, wherein each peer node comprises a network interface configured to communicate with one or more other ones of said peer nodes over one or more networks, and wherein each peer node is configured to store advertisements to network resources, wherein each network resource advertisement comprises a plurality of key/value pairs; one of the plurality of peer nodes configured to: cache an index comprising one or more key/value pairs from one or more network resource advertisements stored on others of the plurality of peer nodes, wherein each key/value pair indicates a particular one of the others of the peer nodes that a corresponding network resource advertisement is stored on; receive a query message from another one of the plurality of peer nodes, wherein the query message requests a particular network resource, and wherein the query message includes one or more key/value pairs of an advertisement for the particular network resource; perform a search of the cached index for matches to the one or more key/value pairs from the query message; and if one or more matching key/value pairs is found in the cached index, forward the query message to one or more of the plurality of peer nodes indicated by the matching key/value pairs.