hi all you developers out there,

here some ideas on improved search capabilities for clients (some would need additional information from servers though - don't know if the protocol specs allow this) ...

1) QoS as search criteria
specifying specific QoS requirements in a search really would help. this could be a (measured) bandwith specification like "only hosts that have a bandwith to me larger than x" or "only hosts that currently have free slots". what BearShare tries with green, red and color-less bars doesn't really help, as they do not even tell what exactly it means. also the speed given by the user doesn't help - had 1,5 Mbps downloads from hosts with given 24kbit connection (what is that supposed to be anyway?)

2) logical operators
logical operators like known from the web-based search engines would be really nice. at a minimum a "search-by-phrase" functionality should be implemented - this is needed for resumes which have to have the same name (don't they?). but also searching for interpret a but not the always available title b would be nice and help to minimise the results shown (maybe also the network traffic if possible to implement on protocol basis).

i will wait and see if any of you developers check this forum. have a couple of other ideas i might post if i get any feedback. good work anyway out there - please keep it up

Another way you could impove searches is to incorporate MD5 checksums into searching, that way if you found one file you liked you could find all of the identical files by comparing the MD5

passive searching in the results to filter out any files one doen't want would be another nice-to-have feature ....