Seems like what should be in each torrent is a virtual appliance preloaded with one shard of the data, where that virtual appliance has a pre-baked index for se

Seems like what should be in each torrent is a virtual appliance preloaded with one shard of the data, where that virtual appliance has a pre-baked index for searching just that shard's data. Then one more torrent for a small search-coordinator appliance that fans your search query out to all N shard appliances.