Sharepoint design question

I have some questions about the indexing functionality of Sharepoint. For my
company I need to made a Sharepoint design. We have locations all over the
world and the management would like to have a Sharepoint farm at each
location.
But (there is always a but :-) they also would like to have a central index,
so that wherever the user is located if he/she starts a search all relevant
documents are found. This can be accomplished by implementing Shared Services
at our central location and configure the that environment as the Shared
Services provider and all other farms as Shared Services Consumer. The only
thing I am worried about is the following:
- Our network is very complex. Some locations are connected directly to the
central location, but other locations are connected to other locations,
creating a chain
of locations before it reaches the central location (a total of +/- 25
locations).
For example:
Central location
|
+-----Location 1
|
+-----Location 2 ------Location 3 ------Location 4
Besides these chains, the bandwidth is also limited for some sites (256kb,
90% use).

The questions about indexing are:
- How does indexing exactly work? If the indexing server on the central
location does all of the indexing work, a lot of data will be transfered to
the central location and propagated back to the search servers for each
crawl. Even when you do a Incremental Update. Because the limited bandwith
and current load, this option is not possible at all.

- There is a indexing server located in each farm on each location. Can this
server be used to do the crawling and reducing the indexing load?

- I also have thought about placing an index server of the central
environment on each location and configure that index server to index the
location. But I am not sure if this idea is possible to configure and if so,
it is a solution you would like to have in place.

- Is there any other option I haven't thought about?

Kind regards,

Yorick
.

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