Today, most of the information query servers typically use the centralized approach where each servers are isolated from one another. In a large scale Grid setup where there are many organizations, each with their own information servers, it is not feasible to deploy a centralized database to aggregate all the data. Using a peer-to-peer (P2P) approach allows us to connect each of the individual information servers to form a federated virtual network.

In this paper, we propose the GridSearch framework, a generic P2P query framework that can support any type of query content. We present the design and architecture of the framework, and the benefits of implementing it using the JXTA platform. We then show how the framework is used to build a distributed Grid service registry network for facilitating service discovery.