After installing and running it is was blown away.. There's over 100 TBs of stuff, but the downloads are slow. And you get non-stop searches for filth that jam up your downloads.

Then I got to thinking, why not put a filter in a client, that filters out searches of text that a user has pre-specified, and then drops the search so it won't get sent any further to other computers, thus saving about %50 of the bandwidth for legit purposes.

then you have people filtering out mp3's..

i'll tell you what really need doing..
i downloaded bearshare today.. and noticed something..

90 % or more download requests that are sent to me are from the web. if we block web usage gnutella will be fixed.. those sites that search gnutella and let you download from it.. are apparently more popular than gnutella.. meaning that most people dont share anything..

Construct the client to not return search results unless the client is sharing at least 1MB worth of files

You all, and by all I would like to include each post in this topic, have missed the point. The whole point of Gnutella was free distribution of data, and filters will change that. Who decides what is 'legitimate', who should dictate what searches should be passed along?

Also, on a more serious note, what will keep a record company from sticking dummy clients in the network? These dummy clients applying filtering technology could filter part, or all search requests. Such things, to me, are unacceptable, especially when you think about what Gnutella really means.

If you wanna block freeloaders and websearches d/l limewire... it has an option to block web d/l's (The searcher is greeted by an HTML page that advises them to download a gnutella client and to give something back.) Limewire also lets you control what you consider a freeloader to be based on # of files rather than MB. So you can block people sharing less than a certain number of files.

confucius, although I agree you shouldn't filter out searches etc... I think it should be looked at as a way for us to reduce network traffic and bottom line queries are one of the biggest bandwidth eaters on the network, so a way to reduce them would be nice. Something like a reflector from clip2, each person carries a list of files for all the comps they are directly connected to. This would allow searches to actually travel 1 less hop. Which would make a big difference at the outer edge. - For example lets say each person is connected to 4 computers and the TTL is 7. So you are connected to 16384 computers. But if you reduced your TTL to 6, 4096. You would actually save 12288 query requests. And lets say that is times a 80 byte query hit... that's 960KB of bandwidth freed up from one search alone. And gnutella averages 10 queries/sec so in 1 minute you would save 576MB of bandwidth across the network.

Also the options in Limewire to filter. I mean lets face it you probably don't want the following to show up....

*.exe - possible virus/worm/trojan/etc
*. - that new worm that just appeared
*.html - you can get it off the web
*.vbs - prolly a virus/worm/etc

And as in limewire dropping stupid large result searches like.... *.mp3, or *.???, as well as short names (ie: anything less than 3 letters)

Also freeloaders and web searches are good that they let others share our files but... then you get people who search on the web and then use a program like DAP or flashget to d/l your files and they take up 5 slots and all your bandwidth, so not only are they sucking up valuable resources on the network but they also are not going to share that file they just downloaded. People need to give back for the sake of the gnutella community. I personally leave my connection on each night so people can d/l from me. I only turn it off if I need to reboot.

That's my $.02