The importance and size of Web search engines is increasing daily. Information retrieval systems based on a single centralized index present several problems, which lead to the use of distributed information retrieval systems to effectively search for and locate the required information. In this study, we analyze two improvements over the brokers’ bottlenecks in a distributed information retrieval system. We demonstrate that reducing the partial results sets will improve the response time of a distributed system by 53%, with a negligible probability of changing the system’s precision and recall values. Finally, we present a simple hierarchical distributed broker model that will reduce the response times for a distributed system by 55%.