In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the Diligent Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science.