While current search engines seem to easily handle the size of the data available on the Internet, they cannot provide fresh results. The most up-to-date data always resides on the data sources. Efficiently interconnecting data providers, however, is not an easy problem. Peer-to-peer computing is the latest technology to address this problem. However, efficient query processing in peer-to-peer networks remains an open research area. In this paper, we present a performance study of a system that facilitates efficient searches of large numbers of independent data providers on the Internet. In our scenario, each data provider becomes an autonomous node in a large peer-to-peer system. Using small indices on each node, we can efficiently direct queries submitted on any node to the relevant sources. Experiments with a large peer-to-peer network demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.