perhaps this has been suggested already, to handle the congestion, groups like those in the newsgroups may be created within the gnutella network. My idea is that each client identified itself as joining a certain group in gnutella. This information will be pass on to other clients allowing searching and downloading among group members only (that is query from other group will be halted). A client will also maintain a list of group names encounter within the network, with the purpose of directing the information to other client who wishes to join a particular group. A query from other group will get a response of the correct ip of the other group from the "referer", if this other group exists. If there is more than one client identifying itself as belonging to a group, only the ip of the last client is kept. if a client is changing group, it has to notify the "referer" of a ip where the group last exists, or tell the "referer" that the group no longer exists. This idea may not work. There could be some problems, but there could be some workaround too.