Search tips? I'm not finding much...
 

Well, after my initial concern of Lime Wire being OS 10.2 incompatible, it looks like all is well...until I noticed the very small number of items I can actually find in the search window. I'm connected, and Limewire says there's something like 342 Tera-bytes of data at my fingertips, way more than I ever saw with previos versions...but my searches don't turn up very much. Even a search for "Rolling Stones" produces only a dozzen or so hits. Usually I would see 1000+ hits for a search like that in earlier versions. A strange notice I recieved while watching incoming searches flicker by (come on, you know you've all done that a few times:) saying that my client is some kind of "shielded version" and I will see very few incoming searches as a result. Is it limiting my outgoing searches as well? Whats going on here?

Update - it says my client is a "leaf node sheild by an Ultra Peeper. Hence you will see few or no searches in the monitor window" Umm, ok...

Basically Limewire has two modes: Ultrapeer and Leaf

People with fast connections will sometimes automatically become an Ultrapeer. They handle a large amount of traffic and act as hubs at the centre of a number of leafs. The shielding bit refers to this - that since you are a leaf the ultrapeer handles most of the searches in your part of Gnutella so you don't see them. This does not restrict your ability to search, however.

The statistics for available files mean nothing as some clients don't handle them properly (or at all).

Most serious P2P users have more than one client to increase the possibility of finding files. Sometimes files that don't appear in one will appear in another (especially if you have a spread of different networks). On OSX you could try the following apart from Limewire:

Phex (info on this forum) - GNUTELLA
Acquisition (Limewire clone with native GUI) - GNUTELLA
iSwipe - MULTIPLE NETS
eDonkey2000 - EDONKEY NET
CarrachoX - CARRACHO NET

You'll find links for them all on any search engine like Google.