Why Do My Search Results Stall At 25-30 %

ursula · #1 (**permalink**) July 17th, 2008

The following is originally from arne-bab of Gnutella and Phex fame and the original thread may be viewed here > http://www.gnutellaforums.com/new-ph...tml#post322746

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The facts are that it is matter of overall network health:

If all searches return just about 300 results, then only 300 results per query have to be 'transported', and that means that the network has to transport less searches and that it can be scaled up to become more efficient.

So much now for the technical reason.

Now for my own experience: Yes, spam bugs me, too, and much so.

There are simply files which are very hard to find, because spam stops the search, so legitimate results don't even get into reach.

And, although there once was an idea about how to stop spam for good, that idea never made its way into the mainstream Gnutella Client releases.

So at the moment, we don't have good enough anti-spam algorithms, and Gnutella is widespread (i.e. popular) enough that people spam it.

It might be that the technical reason will be too weak, soon, so we'll have to adapt to an improved way of searching.

The basic Gnutella Protocol is damn efficient, but nowadays it gets spammed too badly to allow easily finding rare files.

IDEA: Don't stop rare searches on some results. Always carry them through till you get at least 300 results. The spam will make sure that the network doesn't get hit by this (I know this sounds strange, but we can leverage the spammers to keep the network safe from greedy searches - they won't like this

).