In an rather old article, it is suggested that 70% of the servants are not sharing:
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/iss...dar/index.html

Think of it - if the 70% figure is right, then 91% of the bandwith consumed by serchrequests today is wasted. Why? Because 91% (1 - 0.3*0.3) of the requests goes either from freeloader to freeloader, from freeloader to sharer or from sharer to freeloader. All of these should be shaved away.

In my opinion - this is the area where Gnutella clients could develop the most. I am not a developer of Gnutella clients, I just have some ideas:

Don't send serchrequests to Freeloaders. That is, you should not drop the freeloaders from your list of connected hosts. Doing that would damage the network. But, you should test and rate the hosts with some methods; Brainstorming - Send a search that is build up using frequent words in the users shared directory and/or earlier searchs, set the TTL to 1 and register the number of files returned. Using this number as a rating, the hostlist should become better and better for the user.

So, what happens with the freeloaders (the "glue" of our community)?
They would be given a rating of 0, using the above mentioned method. That would put them in the same group as those who share files that I am not interested in.
You should allow them to connect to your servant. You should answer and forward their serches. But you should never send the users searches to them.

So, what would happen if all the clients used this strategy?
I think the searches would become much more efficient and everyone would live happily ever after.

Stig Eide