Best Strategy?

We have a server running Indexing Service which has had .NET framework installed.
Another server is acting as Intranet server with ASP .NET running IIS.
We would like to create an app. which will interrogate the Indexing service and display results on Intranet.
Rather than having to install and manage IIS on the 1st server I wonder whether some service .NET app could be written to run there and be called by the Web app running on the Intranet server?
The question is, what would be the best architecture?
Presumably a Web Service would need IIS to be running (??) or would creating a windows service be best?
Thanks for your thoughts.

If you are not installing IIS, I think you can forget about the web service idea. They would require someway to receive http requests.

You could make a windows service that sends its response using XML and SOAP so it can be parsed and used as a web service.