An improved system and method for flexible object placement and soft-state indexing of objects in a distributed object store is provided. A distributed object store may be provided by a large number of system nodes operably coupled to a network. A system node provided may include an access module for communicating with a client, an index module for building an index of a replicated data object, a data module for storing a data object on a computer readable medium, and a membership and routing module for detecting the configuration of operable nodes in the distributed system. Upon failure of an index node, the failure may be detected at other nodes, including those nodes that store the replicas of the object. These nodes may then send new index rebuilding requests to a different node that may rebuild the index for servicing any access request to the object.