Hello, I'm a university student with a project that is displaying incoming gnutellanet searches on a large LED board in realtime. The software is based on Limewire source code.

I am trying to make sense of the queries and in particular the high percentage of relatively hardcore porn queries. Does anyone have a sense of this? Is this a true enough window onto the diverse gnutella community or are some of these queries automatically generated as some form of spam?

Of the thousands of queries I receive each minute, I noticed that the mix tends to vary at different times of day and night, which seems to make sense, but also that I sometimes get an unexpectedly "wholesome" mixture, as though it has to do with where on the network I've been positioned.

What could explain this variation and what are gnutella users really searching for?

Dan Michaelson
dan.michaelson@yale.edu