From my experience and a little guesstimating as to what is going on, it looks like most users have non-contributory connections (ultra-slow 56k or TTL=1) so once your search hits one of these users, it dies. Their 56K isn't even really 56K as they probably have throughput of 33K which is further cut down by their simultaneous browsing and chatting whilst waiting for gnotella to finish giving search results.

The chance of hitting these users is very significantly high. This may be why you don't get search results returned or why just a few paltry results occur after a long time.

Once in awhile, you will be lucky and make an outgoing connection to a fast user who happens to be serving up a lot of files. Unfortunately, there are all too few actual people serving up files relative to the total number of users.

However, there are so many users trying to download that the file server's site has reached its max number limit of files being uploaded to the net at that time. The normal number is 4, but the site may set that higher. So, this may explain why you find something quickly on a search, but when you click to download, you don't get a file pushed to you.

Lots of greedy sites allow searches but may set the max number of files to 1 or 0. So you also can't get any files from them. Or they have moved the files and didn't bother refreshing.

Selfish users kill the golden goose. I wish there was some way that clients could have a flag that allows/disallows greedy users to connect. Nassssty users should be censored off. Ooops. That brings us back to square zero since gnutellanet wasn't meant to be that way. *sigh*