Just to let everyone know, we're working on a new searching architecture for all of Gnutella. It's called "GUESS," or the Gnutella UDP Extension for Scalable Searches. It will be several orders of magnitude more efficient. In particular, it will provide far better search results for rare files than the current system. It basically scraps the entire Gnutella search model in favor of searching UltraPeers one by one very quickly over UDP until you get enough results. You should see it coming out in beta for LimeWire 3.0 or so in the next several months.

I would agree that the decreased search results on the current network are not a result of changes in LimeWire. In particular, I would assert that using LW 1.8, or any older LimeWire, would experience similar poor results. The Gnutella network is extremely dynamic, with little changes having big effects. The most significant recent change was Morpheus completely switching its code base to yet another open source project. This means, among other things, that they no longer support UltraPeers. This means that now the majority of clients on Gnutella do not have UltraPeers, dramatically worsening the density of the network and, most likely, making search results significantly worse.

So, I'd just ask that everyone keep in mind the degree to which the network of today is significantly different from the network even two months ago (before the new Morpheus). The change to the searching architecture that we're working on should really bring Gnutella to a completely different level, giving you much better results while using far less bandwidth.

Thanks!