As far as I could tell, that was speculation on Vinnies part, if you read that point in the GDF, Vinnie had no proof what so ever. Ive even heard that Bearshare even does its update functions from with in gnutella, that in fact sounds like everytime a user starts Bearshare he is sending out queries for newer versions of bearshare. Bearshare has way more users, that is about 45% of the gnutella users out there, phex is less then 1%. And gnutella right now for example has 30,000 users on it at once, that would mean BearShare is aproximately 13,500 users at once (it may be larger then that, but that is aproximately the number of users on right now) and aproximately 300 phex users. Its hard to estimate the number of queries that are generated because there is more then 30k users, they are just not on gnutella at the same time. I've heard you can not even turn this feature off, if you dont want to do that.

Actually what I would like to see is configurable auto-search rates. For example have a base rate of every 30 or so minutes based upon how well the file has been able to download, and then for some of them give them a higher priority then others.